
Class 



Book.___ 



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jUxber^itie oEtiition 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

BEING VOLUME VII. 

OF 

EMERSON'S COMPLETE WORKS 



^ 



I 



^ 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 

TWELVE CHAPTERS 



BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



Beto anti EeijiseU d^tiitwn 




BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 

1883 



1-'^ 



^■^V/ 



Copyright, 1870, 
By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1883, 
By EDWARD W. EMERSON. 

All rights reserved. 



By Tmrnfer 



TAc Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS. 

PAQE 

Society and Solitude 7 

Civilization 21 

Art 39 

Eloquence 61 

Domestic Life 99 

Farming 131 . 

Works and Days 149 

Books 179 

Clubs 211 

Courage 237 

Success 265 

Old Age 297 



1 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 



I 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 



I FELL in with a humorist on my travels, who 
had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Me- 
dusa, and who assured me that the name which 
that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was 
a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculp- 
tor who carved it intended it for Memory, the 
mother of the Muses. In the conversation that 
followed, my new friend made some extraordinary 
confessions. (^" Do you not see," he said, "the 
penalty of learning, and that each of these schol- 
ars whom you have met at S , though he were 

to be the last man, would, like the executioner in 
Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one ? "j He 
added many lively remarks, but his evident ear- 
nestness engaged my attention, and in the weeks 
that followed we became better acquainted. He 
had good abilities, a genial temper, and no vices ; 
but he had one defect, — he could not speak in the 
tone of the people. There was some paralysis on 
his will, such that when he met men on common 
terms he spoke weakly and from the point, like a 



I 



10 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 

flighty girl. His consciousness of the fault made it 
worse. He envied every drover and lumbeiman 
in the tavern their manly speech.N He coveted 
Mirabeau's don terrible de la familiarite^ belicA^g 
that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the man 
from whom kings liave the most to fear, (For him- 
self he declared that he could not get enough alone 
to write a letter to a friend. /He left the city ; he 
hid himself in pastures^ The solitary river was 
not solitary enough ; the sun and moon put him 
out. When he bought a house, the first thing < he 
did was to plant trees. He could not enough con- 
ceal himself. Set a hedge here ; set oaks there, — 
trees behind trees; above all, set evergreens, for 
they will keep a secret all the year round, v The 
m.ost agreeable compliment you could pay him was 
to imply that you had not observed him in a house 
or a street where you had met him.^ Whilst he suf- 
fered at being seen where he was, he consoled him- 
self with the delicious thought of the inconceivable 
number of places where he was not. (^ All he wished 
of his tailor was to provide that sober mean of 
color and cut which would never detain the eye 
for a moment. \ He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to 
London. In all the variety of costumes, a carni- 
val, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he 
could never discover a man in the street who wore 
anything like his own dress. He would have given 



\ 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 11 

his soul for tlie ring of Gyges. His dismay at his 
visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. " Do 
you think," he said, " I am in such great terror of 
being shot, — I, who am only waiting to shuffle off 
my corporeal jacket to slip away into the back 
stars, and put diameters of the solar system and 
sidereal orbits between me and all souls, — there 
to wear out ages in solitude, fend forget memory^^ 
itself, if it be possible^' \ He had a remorse run- 
. niiig to despair of his social gaucheries, and walked 
miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, 
the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders. 
/God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness 
V. has no forgiveness in heaven or earth. He admired 
in Newton not so much his theory of the moon as 
his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to 
insert his name with the solution of the problem in 
the " Philosophical Transactions " : "It would per- 
haps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I 
chiefly study to decline." 

These conversations led me somewhat later to-- 
the knowledge of similar cases, and to the dis- 
covery that they are not of very infrequent occur- 
rence. Few substances are found pure^^nature. 
Those constitutions which can bear in open day 
the rough dealing of the world must be of that 
mean and average structure such as iron and salt, 
atmospheric air, and water. But there are metals, 



12 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 

like potassium and sodium, whicli, to be kept pure, 
must be kept under naptlia. Sucli are the talents 
determined on some specialty, which a culminating 
civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and 
in royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. 
To the culture of the world an Archimedes, a New- 
ton is indispensable ; so she guards them by a cer- 
tain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond 
of dancing, port, and clubs, we should have had no 
" Theory of the Sphere " and no " Principia." 
^""^^hey had that necessity of isolation which genius 
feels. Each must stand on his glass tripod if he 
would keep his electricity. Even Swedenborg, 
whose theory of the universe is based on affection, 
and who reprobates to weariness the dange r and 
vice of pure intellect, is constrained to make an ex- 
traordinary exception ; " There are also angels who 
do not live consociated, but separate, house and 
house ; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because 
they are the best of angels." 

We have known many fine geniuses with that 
imperfection that they cannot do anything useful, 
not so much as write one clean sentence. 'Tis 
worse, and tragic, that no man -is fit for society 
who has fine traits. At a distance he is admired, 
but bring him hand to hand, he is a cripple. One 
protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, 
and one by an acid, worldly manner, — each con- 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 13 

cealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his 
incapacity for strict association. But there is no 
remedy that can reach the heart of the disease but 
either habits of self-reliance that should go in prac- 
tice to making the man independent of the human 
race, or else a religion of love. Now he hardly 
seems entitled to marry; for how can he protect 
a woman, who cannot protect himself ? 
( We pray to be _conventiQiig.l. But the wary 
Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is any- 
thing go^cl in_jouA Danttf'yaaj-^se^yUja^ company, 
and was never invited to dinnerT^T^ficlmel Angelo 
had a sad, sour time oi\t. ,Tlie..^nist^rs of beauty 
are rarely beautiful in coaches aijd jalo^ns. Colum- 
bus discovered no isle or key so lonely as nimself . 
Yet each of these potentatefe'sa\V' i^51l the reason 
of his exclusion. S.ojjtary was he ?^ Why, yes ; 
but his society was limited only By .tji^ affliount of 
brain Nature appropriated^in J;l;g^t age to carry on 
the government of the world. ' " Tf* I sta y," said 
Dante, when there wi^'q[uestiqn c^.go^ng to Home, 
" who will go ? and ifl| gb^ w^ io w^tl sta j^? " 

But the necessity of solitude isl(leej)er than we 
have said, and is organic. I have seen many a 
philosopher whose world is large enough for only 
one person. [ He affects to be a good companion ; 
but we are still surprising his secret, that he means 
and ^needs to impose his system on all the rest. J 



14 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 

The determination of each is from all the others, 
like that of each tree up into free space. ^ 'Tis no 
wonder, when each has his whole head, our societies 
should be so smallNX Like President Tyler, our 
party falls from us every day, and we must ride 
in a sulky at last, j Dear heart ! take it sarlly liQine- 
to thee, — there is no co-operation. We begin with 
friendships, and' all our youtlTls a reconnoitering 
and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall com- 
bine for the salvation of men. But so the remoter 
stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no 
group which a telescope will not resolve ;(_and the 
( dearest fi^iends are separated by impassable gulfs.A 
/ llie co-operation isvinyohmtary, and is"pur~upon 
'., us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a 
part of his prerogative. 'T is fine for "us to talk ; 
we sit and muse and are serene and complete ; but 
the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes 
a fraction. 

Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in 
a moral union of .two superior persons whose confi- 
dence in each other for long years, out of sight and 
in sight, and against all_appearances, is at last jus- 
tified by victorious proof of probity to gods and 
men, causing joyful emotions, tears and glory, — 
though there be for heroes this moral imion, yet 
they too are as far off as ever from an intellectual 
union, and the moral union is for comparatively ^ 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 15 

low and external purposes, like tlie co-operation of 
a ship's company or of a fire-club. But how insu- 
lar ^nd patheticany"soIitary"are all the people we 
know ! C Nor dare they tell what they think of each 
other when they meet in the street. ) We have a 
fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world 
with superficial and treacherous courtesies ! ) M 

Such is the tragic necessity which strict science 
finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, 
irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips 
into the desert, and making our warm covenants 
sentimental and momentary. We must infer that 
the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were 
to be secured at such ruinous cost. (They are 
deeper than can be told, and belong to the immen- 
sities and eternities.^ They reach down to that 
depth (where society itseK originates and disap- 
pears ; where the question is. Which is first, man or 
men ? where the_individual is lost in^hisjojjrce.y 

But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no 
metaphysics can make right or tolerable. This 
result is so against nature, such a half-view, that 
it must be corrected by a common sense and expe- 
rience. " A man is born by the side of his father, 
and there he remains." A man must be clothed 
with society, or . we shall feel a certain bareness 
and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished 
member. He is to be dressed in arts and institu- 



16 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 

tions, as well as in body-garments. (Now and then 
a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must ;) 
but coop up most men and you undo them. ( " The 
king lived and ate in his hall with men, and under- 
stood men," said Selden. '\ When a young barrister 
said to the late Mr. Mason, " I keep my chamber 
to read law," — " Eead law ! " replied the veteran, 
"'tis in the court-room you must readjajv." Nor is 
the rule otherwise for literatiTfer If you would 
learn to write, 't is in the street you must learn it. 
Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts 
you must frequent the public square. iThe people, 
and not the college, is the writer's home. ^^ A scholar 
is a candle which the love and desire of all men 
will light. Never his lands or his rents, but the 
power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled 
under this bearded and that rosy visage is his rent 
and ration, ^pis products are as needful as those 
of the baker or the weaver. Society cannot do 
without cultivated men. 'As soon as the first^ants 
are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative. ^ 
'^ 'Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our 
own top ; but through sympathy we are capable of 
energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a 
certain fury of performance they can rarely reach 
alone. Here is the use of society; it is so easy 
with the great to be great ; so easy to come uj) to 
an existing standard ; — as easy as it is to the lover 



■^^ 




SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 17 

to swim to his maiden tlirougli waves so grim be- 
fore. The benefits of affection are immense; and 
tthe one event which never loses its romance is the 
encounter with superior persons on terms allowing ; 
the happiest intercourse. 

It by no means follows that we are not fit for 
society, because soirees are tedious and because the 
soiree finds us tedious. A backwoodsman, who 
had been sent to the university, told me that when 
he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school 
talk together, he reckoned himself a boor ; but 
whenever he caught them apart, and had one to 
himself alone, then they were the boors and he the 
better man. And if we recall the rare hours when 
we encountered the best persons, we then found 
ourselves, and then first society seemed to exist. 
That was society, though in the transom of a brig 
or on the Florida Keys. 

A cold sluggish blood thinks it has not facts 
enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in 
the conversation. (But they who^ speak Jbiaye no 
more, — have less J 'T is not new facts that avail, 
but the heat to dissolve everybody's facts. Heat 
puts you in right relation with magazines of facts. 
The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the want 
of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, 
v_ as if God should raise the dead. The recluse wit- 
nesses what others perform by their aid, with a 



18 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE, 

kind of fear. It is as much out of his possibility 
as the prowess of Coeur-de-Lion, or an Irishman's 
day's-work on the railroad. 'T is said the present 
and the future are always rivals. Animal sj)irits 
constitute the power of the present, and their feats 
are like the structure of a pyramid. Their result 
is a lord, a general, or a boon companion. Before 
these what a base mendicant is Memory with his 
leathern badge 1 But this genial heat is latent in 
all constitutions, and is disengaged only by the 
friction of society. As Bacon said of manners, 
"To obtain them, it only needs not to despise 
them," so we say of animal spirits that they are 
the spontaneous product of health and of a social 
habit. " For beha^dor, men learn it, as they take 
diseases, one of another." 

But the people are to be taken in very small 
\ dos^. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar, y 
In society, high Sbdvantages are set down to the in- 
dividual as disqualifications. ( We sink as easily as 
we rise, through sympathy. n^ So many men whom I 
know are degraded by their sympathies ; their na- 
tive aims being high enough, but their relation all 
too tender to the gross people about them. ^ Men ^*^ 

I cannot afford to live together on their merits, and | 
they adjust themselves by their demerits, — by / 

\ their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and ani- ' 
jual good-nature. J They untune and dissipate the • 
brave aspirant. 



SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 19 

The remedy is to reinforce each of these moods 
from the other. / Conversation will not corrupt us 
if we come to tlie assembly in our own garb and 
speech and with the energy of health to select what 
is ours and reject wEaFis not.^ Society we must 
have ;(T3ut let it be society, and not exchanging 
news or eating from tlie~same dishj Is it society 
to sit in one of your chairs ? I cannot go to the 
houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not 
wish to be alone. / Society exists by chemical affin- 
ity, and not otherwise.) 

f Put any company of people together with free- 
dom for conversation, and a rapid self-distribution 
takes place into sets and pairs. The best are ac- 
cused of exclusivenessTj|{It would be more true to 
say they separate as oil from water, as children 
from old people, without love or hatred in the 
matter, each seeking his like ; and any interference 
with the affinities would produce constraint and 
suffocation. All conversation is a magnetic exper- 
iment. I know that my friend can talk eloquently; 
you know that he cannot articulate a sentence : we 
have seen him in different company. ( Assort your 
party, or invite none.)^ Put Stubbs and Coleridge, 
Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you 
make them all wretched^ 'T is an extempDre^Sing- 
Sing built in a parlor. Leave them to seek their 
own mates, and they tvill be as merry as sparrows. 



20 SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 

A higher civility will re-establish in our customs 
a certain reverence which we have lost. What to 
do with these brisk young men who break through 
all fences, and make themselves at home in every 
house ? (. I find out in an instant if my companion 
does not want me, and ropes cannot hold me when 
my welcome is gone. One would think that the 
affinities would pronounce themselves with a surer 
reciprocity. ] ^^^--^ 

Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put 
us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is 
in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. 
Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal^ We 
must keep our head in the one and our hands in 
the other. )The conditions are met, if we keep our 
independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. ( These 
wonderful horses need to be driven T^ynne hands.) 
We require such a solitude as shall hold us to its 
revelations when we are in the street and in pal- 
aces ; for most men are cowed in society, and say 
good things to^you in private, but will not stand to 
them in public. BuF let-us^hot be the victims of 
words. Society and solitude are deceptive names. 
It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer 
people, but the readiness of sympathy, that imports ; 
and a sound mind will derive its principles from 
insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient 
and absolute right, and will accept society as the 
natural element in which they are to be applied, j 



CIVILIZATION. 



CIVILIZATION. 



A CERTAIN degree of progress from the rudest 
state in which man is found, — a dweller in caves, 
or on trees, like an ape, — a cannibal, and eater of 
pounded snails, worms, and offal, — a certain de- 
gree of progress from this extreme is called Civ^ 
ilization. It is a vague, complex name, of many 
degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition. Mr. 
Guizot, writing a book on the subject, does not. It 
implies the evolution of a highly organized man, 
brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in 
practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor, 
and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, 
we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that 
has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, 
no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call bar- 
barous. And after many arts are invented or im- 
ported, as among the Turks and Moorish nations, 
it is often a little complaisant to call them civil- 
ized. 

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has 
a civilization of its own. The Chinese and Japan- 



24 CIVILIZATION. 

ese, though each complete in his way, is different 

from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. 

(The term imports a mysterious progress. In the 

1 brutes is none ; and in mankind to-day the savage 
tribes are gradually extinguished rather than civil- 
ized. The' Indians of this country have not learned 
the white man's work ; and in Africa the negro of 
to-day is the negro of Herodotus. In other races 
the growth is not arrested, but the like progress 
that is made by a boy " when he cuts his eye- 
teeth," as we say, — childish illusions passing daily 
away and he seeing things really and comprehen- 
sively, — is made by tribes. It is the learning the 
secret of curnulative powerj^ of advancing on one's 
self. It implies a facility of association, power to 
compare, the ceasing^ f ror a fixed ideas,. The Indian 
is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart from 
his habits and traditions. He is overpowered by 
the gaze of the white, and his eye sinks. The oc- 
casion of one of these starts of growth is always 
some novelty that astounds the mind and provokes 
it to dare to change. Thus there is a Cadmus, a 
Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning of each 
improvement, — some superior foreigner importing 
new and wonderful arts, and teaching them. Of 
course he must not know too much, but must have 
the sympathy, language, and gods of those he 
, would inform. But chiefly the sea-shore has been 



CIVILIZATION, 25 

the point of departure, to knowledge, as to com- 
merce. The most advanced nations are always 
those who navigate the most. The power which 
the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him 
very fast, and the change of shores and population 
\^ clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam. 

Where shall we begin or end the list of those 
feats of liberty and wit, each of which feats made 
an epoch of history ? Thus the effect of a framed 
or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, 
and refinement of the builder. A man in a cave 
or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate 
than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple 
a labor as a house being achieved, his chief enemies 
are kept at bay. He is safe from the teeth of wild 
animals, from frost, sun-stroke, and weather ; and 
fine faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. In- 
vention and art are born, manners and social beauty 
and delight. 'T is wonderful how soon a piano 
gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would 
think they found it under a pine-stump. With it 
comes a Latin grammar, — and one of those tow- 
head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now 
let colleges, now let senates take heed ! for here is 
one who opening these fine tastes on the basis of 
the pioneer's iron constitution, will gather all their 
laurels in his strong hands. 

When the Indian trail gets widened, graded and 



26 CIVILIZATION. 

bridged to a good road, there is a benefactor, there 
is a missionary, a pacificator, a wealth-bringer, a 
maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another 
step in civility is the change from war, hunting, and 
pasturage, to agriculture. Our Scandinavian fore- 
fathers have left us a significant legend to convey 
their sense of the importance of this step. " There 
was once a giantess who had a daughter, and the 
child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field. 
Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and 
thumb, and put him and his plough and his oxen 
into her apron, and carried them to her mother, and 
said, ' Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I 
found wriggling in the sand ? ' But the mother 
said, ' Put it away, my child ; we must begone out 
of this land, for these people will dwell in it.' " 
Another success is the post-office, with its educating 
energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a 
certain religious sentiment in mankind ; so that the 
power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to 
guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and 
i comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery 
/ brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civiliza- 
\ tion. 

The division of labor, the multiplication of the 
arts of peace, which is nothing but a large allow- 
ance to each man to choose his work according to 
his faculty, — to live by his better hand, — fills the 



CIVILIZATION. 27 

State with useful and happy laborers; and they, 
creating demand by the very temptation of their 
productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by 
good sale : and what a police and ten command- 
ments their work thus becomes. So true is Dr. 
Johnson's remark that " men are seldom more in- 
nocently employed than when they are making 
money." 

The skilful combinations of civil government, 
though they usually follow natural leadings, as the 
lines of race, language, religion, and territory, yet 
require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in 
their result delight the imagination. " We see in- 
surmountable multitudes obejdng, in opposition to 
their strongest passions, the restraints of a power 
which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a 
single individual marked and punished at the dis- 
tance of half the earth." ^ 

Eight position of woman in the State is another 
index. Poverty and industry with a healthy mind 
read very easily the laws of humanity, and love 
them : place the sexes in right relations of mutual 
respect, and a severe morality gives that essential 
charm to woman which educates all that is delicate, 
poetic, and self - sacrificing ; breeds courtesy and 
learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate ; 
so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civil- 
ization is the influence of good women. 
1 Dr. Thomas Brown. 



28 CIVILIZATION. 

Another measure of culture is the diffusion of 
knowledge, overrunning all the old barriers of 
caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the uni- 
versity to every poor man's door in the newsboy's 
basket. Scraps of science, of thought, of poetry are 
in the coarsest sheet, so that in every house we hes- 
itate to burn a newspaper until we have looked it 
through. 

The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an 
abridgment and compend of a nation's* arts : the 
shij) steered by compass and chart, longitude reck- 
oned by lunar observation and by chronometer, 
driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at 
vast distances from home, 

" The pulses of her iron heart 
Go beating through the storm." 

No use can lessen the wonder of this control by so 
weak a creature of forces so prodigious. I remem- 
ber I watched, in crossing the sea, the beautiful 
skill whereby the engine in its constant working 
was made to produce two hundred gallons of fresh 
water out of salt water, every hour, — thereby sup- 
plying all the ship's want. 

The skill that pervades complex details ; the 
man that maintains himself; the chimney taught 
to burn its own smoke ; the farm made to produce 
all that is consumed on it; the very prison com- 



CIVILIZATION. 29 

pellecl to maintaiu itself and yield a revenue, and, 
better still, made a reform school and a manufac- 
tory of honest men out of rogues, as the steamer 
made fresh water out of salt, — all these are ex- 
amples of that tendency to combine antagonisms 
and utilize evil which is the index of high civiliza- 
tion. 
" ' Civilization is the result of highly complex organ- 
ization. In the snake, all the organs are sheathed ; 
no hands, no feet, no fins, no wings.. In bird and 
beast the organs are released and begin to play. 
In man they are all unbound and full of joyful 
action. With this uns waddling he receives the 
absolute illumination we call Reason, and thereby 
true liberty. 

Climate has much to do with this melioration. 
The highest civility has never loved the hot zones. 
Wherever snow falls there is usually civil freedom. 
Where the banana grows the animal system is indo- 
lent and pampered at the cost of higher qualities : 
the man is sensual and cruel. But this scale is 
not invariable. High degrees of moral sentiment 
control the unfavorable influences of climate ; and " 
some of our grandest examples of men and of races 
come from the equatorial regions, — as the genius 
of Egypt, of India, and of Arabia. 

These feats are measures or traits of civility; 
and temperate climate is an important influence, 



30 CIVILIZATION. 

though not quite indispensable, for there have been 
learning, philosophy and art in Iceland, and in the 
tropics. But one condition is essential to the social 
education of man, namely, morality. There can 
be no high civility without a deep morality, though 
it may not always call itself by that name, but 
sometimes the point of honor, as in the institution 
of chivalry ; or patriotism, as in the Spartan and 
Roman republics ; or the enthusiasm of some relig- 
ious sect which imputes its virtue to its dogma ; or 
the cabalism or es2)rit de corps of a masonic or 
other association of friends. 

The evolution of a highly-destined society must 
be moral ; it must run in the grooves of the celes- 
tial wheels. It must be catholic in aims. What 
is moral f It is the respecting in action catholic 
or universal ends. Hear the definition which Kant 
gives of moral conduct : ••' Act always so that the 
immediate motive of thy will may become a uni- 
versal rule for all intelligent beings." 

Civilization depends on morality. Everything 
good in man leans on what is higher. This rule 
holds in small as in great. Thus all our strength 
and success in the work of our hands depend on 
our borrowing the aid of the elements. You have 
seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe chop- 
ping upward chips from a beam. How awkward ! 
at what disadvantage he works ! But see him on 



cnn[LiZATioN. 31 

the ground, dressing lils timber under him. Now, 
not his feeble muscles but the force of gravity 
brings down the axe ; that is to say, the planet 
itself splits his stick. The farmer had much ill- 
temper, laziness and shirking to endure from his 
hand-sawyers, until one day he bethought him to 
put his saw-mill on the edge of a waterfall ; and 
the river never tires of turning his wheel ; the river 
is good natured, and never hints an objection. 

We had letters to send: couriers could not go 
fast enough nor far enough ; broke their wagons, 
foundered their horses ; bad roads in spring, snow- 
drifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get 
the horses out of a walk. But we found out that 
the air and earth were full of Electricity, and al- 
ways going our way, — just the way we wanted to 
send. Would he tahe a message f Just as lief 
as not ; had nothing else to do ; would carry it in 
no time. Only one doubt occurred, one staggering 
objection, — he had no carpet-bag, no visible pock- 
ets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry a 
letter. But after much thought and many experi- 
ments we managed to meet the conditions, and to 
fold up the letter in such invisible compact form as 
he could carry in those invisible pockets of liis, 
never \^rought by needle and thread, — aiid it went 
like a charm. 

I admire still more than the saw-mill the skill 



?.9 



CIVILIZATION. 



which, on the sea-shore, makes the tides drive the 
wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages the 
assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, 
and wind, and pump, and saw, and sj)lit stone, and 
roll iron. 

CNow that is the wisdom of a man, in every in- 
stance of his labor,(^to hitch his wagon to a star, ) 
and see his chore done by the gods themselves. 
That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the 
might of the elements. The forces of steam, grav- 
ity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us 
day by day and cost us nothing. 

Our astronomy is full of examples of calling in 
the aid of these magnificent helpers. Thus, on a 
planet so small as ours, the want of an adequate 
base for astronomical measurements is early felt, as, 
for example, in detecting the parallax of a star. 
But the astronomer, having by an observation fixed 
the place of a star, — by so simple an expedient as 
waiting six months and then repeating his obser- 
vation, contrived to put the diameter of the earth's 
orbit, say two hundred millions of miles, between 
his first observation and his second, and this line 
afforded him a respectable base for his triangle. 

All our arts aim to win this vantage. We can- 
not bring the heavenly powers to us, but if we will 
only choose our jobs in directions in which they 
travel, they will undertake them with the greatest 



CUHLIZATION. 33 

pleasure. It is a peremptory rule with them that 
^""^liey never go out of their road. We are dapper 
little busybodies and run this way and that way 
superserviceably ; but they swerve never from their 
foreordained paths, — neither the sun, nor the 
moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote of dust. 

And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so 
all our social and political action leans on princi- 
ples. To accomplish anything excellent the will 
must work for catholic and universal ends. A 
puny creature, walled in on every side, as Daniel 
wrote, — 

" Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how poor a tiling is man ! " 

but when his ^v^ll leans on a principle, when he is 

the vehicle of ideas, he borrows their omnipotence. 

Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas are impregnable, 

and bestow on the hero their invincibility. " It 

was a great instruction," said a saint in Crom well's 

war, " that the best courages are but beams of the 

Almighty. '\ Hitch j our w^on to a star. ^Let us 

/ not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and 

I has: alone. Let us not lie and steal. No q-od will 

1 help. We shall find all their teams going the other 

I way, — Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, 

V Hercules : every god will leave us. Work rather 

for those interests which the divinities honor and 

VOL. VII. 3 



J 



34 CIVILIZATION. 

promote, — justice, love, freedom, knowledge, util- 
ity. 
(^ Tf we can thus ride in Olympian chariots by put- 
ting our works in the path of the celestial circuits, 
we can harness also evil agents, the powers of dark- 
ness, and force them to serve against their will the 
ends of wisdom and virtue. Thus a wise govern- 
ment puts fines and penalties on pleasant vices. 
What a benefit would the American government, 
not yet relieved of its extreme need, render to it- 
self and to every city, village, and hamlet in the 
States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to 
the point of prohibition ! Was it Bonaparte who 
said that he found vices very good patriots ? — "he 
got five millions from the love of brandy, and he 
should be glad to know which of the virtues would 
pay him as much." Tobacco and of)ium have 
broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of 
armies, if you choose to make them pay high for 
such joy as they give and such harm as they do. 

These are traits and measures and modes ; and 
the true test of civilization is, not the census, nor 
the size of cities, nor the crops, — no, but the kind 
of man the country turns out. I see the vast ad- 
vantages of this country, spanning the breadth of 
the temperate zone. I see the immense material 
prosperity, — towns on towns, states on states, and 
wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities ; 



CIVILIZATION. 35 

California quartz-mountains dumped down in New 
York to be repiled architecturally along-shore from 
Canada to Cuba, and thence westward to California 
again. But it is not New York streets, built by the 
confluence of workmen and wealth of all nations, 
though stretching out towards Philadelphia until 
they touch it, and northward until they touch New 
Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and Bos- 
ton, — not these that make the real estimation. 
But when I look over this constellation of cities 
which animate and illustrate the land, and see how 
little the government has to do with their daily 
life, how self-helped and self-directed all families 
are, — knots of men in purely natural societies, so- 
cieties of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual hos- 
pitality, house and house, man acting on man by 
weight of opinion, of longer or better-directed in- 
dustry ; the refining influence of women, the invi- 
tation which experience and permanent causes open 
to youth and labor : — when I see how much each 
virtuous and gifted person, whom all men consider, 
lives affectionately with scores of excellent people 
who are not known far from home, and perhaps 
with great reason reckons these people his supe- 
riors in virtue and in the symmetry and force of 
their qualities, — I see what cubic values America 
has, and in these a better certificate of civilization 
than great cities or enormous wealth. 



36 CIVILIZATION. 

In strictness, the vital re finements are the moral 
and intellectual steps. The appearance of the 
Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh ; in Greece, 
of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and up- 
riglit Socrates, and of the stoic Zeno ; in Judaea, 
the advent of Jesus, and, in modern Christendom, 
of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, — 
are causal facts which carry forward races to new 
convictions and elevate the rule of life. In the 
presence of these agencies it is frivolous to insist 
on the invention of printing or gunpowder, of 
steam-power or gas-light, j)ercussion-caps and rub- 
ber-shoes, which are toys thrown off from that 
security, freedom, and exhilaration which a healthy 
morality creates in society. These arts add a com- 
fort and smoothness to house and street life ; but a 
purer morality, which kindles genius, civilizes civi- 
lization, casts backward all that we held sacred into 
the profane, as the flame of oil throws a shadow 
when shined upon by the flame of the Bude-light. 
Not the less the popular measures of progress will 
ever be the arts and the laws. 

But if there be a country which cannot stand 
any one of these tests, — a country where knowl- 
edge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law 
and statute-law ; where speech is not free ; where 
the post-oflice is violated, mail-bags opened, and 
letters tampered with ; where public debts and pri- 



CIVILIZATION. 37 

vate debts outside of the State are repudiated; 
where liberty is attacked in the primary institu- 
tion of social life ; where the position of the white 
woman is injuriously affected by the outlawry of 
the black woman ; where the arts, such as they 
have, are all imported, having no indigenous life ; 
where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of 
his own hands ; where suffrage is not free or equal ; 
— that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but 
barbarous ; and no advantages of soil, climate, or 
coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs. 

Morality and all the incidents of morality are 
essential ; as, justice to the citizen, and personal 
liberty. Montesquieu says : " Countries are well 
cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are 
free ; " and the remark holds not less but more 
true of the culture of men, than of the tillage of 
land. And the highest proof of civility is that the 
whole public action of the State is directed on se- 
curing the greatest good of the greatest number. 



ART. 



AET. 



All departments of life at the present day, — 
Trade, Politics, Letters, Science, or Religion, — 
seem to feel, and to labor to express, the identity 
of their law. They are rays of one sun ; they trans- 
late each into a new lansTiao^e the sense of the 
other. They are sublime when seen as emanations 
of a Necessity contradistinguished from the vulgar 
Fate by being instant and alive, and dissolving 
man as well as his works in its flowino^ beneficence. 
This influence is conspicuously visible in the prin- 
ciples and history of Art. 

On one side in primary communication with 
absolute truth through thought and instinct, the 
human mind on the other side tends, by an equal 
necessity, to the publication and embodiment of 
its thought, modified and dwarfed by the impurity 
and untruth which in all our experience injure the 
individuality through which it passes. The child 
not only suffers, but cries ; not only hungers, but 
eats. The man not only thinks, but speaks and 
acts. Every thought that arises in the mind, in j 
I its rising aims to pass out of the mind into act J 



42 ART. 

just as every plant, in the moment of germination, 
struggles up to light, toiought ij the seed of ac- 
tion; but action is as much its second form as 
thought is ijts first. J It rises in thought, to the end 
Jhat it may be uttered and acted. The more pro-' 
found the thought, the more burdensome. Always 
in proportion to the dej)th of its sense does it knock 
importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, 
to be done. What is im will ou t. It struggles to 
the birth. Speech is a great pleasure, and action a 
great pleasure ; they cannot be foreborne. 

The utterance of thought and emotion in speech 
and action may be conscious or unconscious. The 
sucking child is an unconscious actor. The man in 
an ecstasy of fear or anger is an unconscious actor. 
A large part of our habitual actions are uncon- 
sciously done, and most of our necessary words 
are unconsciously said. 

"i The conscious utterance of thought, by speech 
or action, to any end, is Art J From the first imi- 
tative babble of a child to the despotism of elo- 
quence ; from his first pile of toys or chip bridge 
to the masonry of Minot Rock Lighthouse or the 
Pacific Railroad ; from the tattooing of the Owhy- 
hees to the Vatican Gallery ; from the simplest ex- 
l^edient of private prudence to the American Con- 
stitution ; from its first to its last works. Art is the 
spirit's voluntary use and combination of things to 



ART. 43 

serve its end. ' The "Will distinguishes it as spirit- 
ual action. Relatively to themselves, the bee, the 
bird, the beaver, have no art ; for what they do 
they do instinctively ; but relatively to the Supreme 
Being, they have. And the same is true of all 
unconscious action : relatively to the doer, it is in- 
stinct ; relatively to the First Cause, it is Art. In 
this sense, recognizing the Spirit which informs 
Nature, Plato rightly said, "Those things which 
are said to be done by Nature are indeed done by 
Divine Art." Art, universally, is the spirit crea- 
tive. It was defined by Aristotle, "The reason of 
the thing, without the matter." 

If we follow the popidar distinction of works 
according to their aim, we should say, the Spirit, 
in its creation, aims at use or at beauty, and hence 
Art divides itself into the Useful and the Fine Arts. 

The useful arts comprehend not only those that 
lie next to instinct, as agriculture, building, weav- 
ing, &c., but also navigation, practical chemistry, 
and the construction of aU the grand and delicate 
tools and instruments by which man serves himself ; 
as language, the watch, the ship, the decimal ci- 
pher ; and also the sciences, so far as they are 
made serviceable to political economy. 

When we reflect on the pleasure we receive from 
a ship, a railroad, a dry-dock ; or from a picture, a 
dramatic representation, a statue, a poem, — we find 



44 ART. 

that these have not a quite simple, but a blended 
origin. We find that the question, What is Art ? 
leads us directly to another, — Who is the Artist ? 
And the solution of this is the key to the history of 
Art. 

I hasten to state the principle which prescribes, 
through different means, its firm law to the useful 
and the beautiful arts. The law is this. The uni- 
versal soul is the alone creator of the useful and 
the beautiful ; therefore to make anything useful or 
beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the 
universal mind. 

In the first place let us consider this in reference 
to the useful arts. Here the omnipotent agent is 
Nature; all human acts are satellites to her orb. 
Nature is the representative of the universal mind, 
and the law becomes this, — that Art must be a 
complement to nature, strictly subsidiary. It was 
said, in allusion to the great structures of the 
ancient Romans, the aqueducts and bridges, that 
"their Art was a Nature working to municipal 
ends." That is a true account of all just works 
of useful art. Smeaton built Eddystone Light- 
house on the model of an oak-tree, as being the 
form in nature best designed to resist a constant 
assailing force. CDollond formed his achromatic 
telescope on the model of the human eye^ Duhamel 
built a bridge by letting in a piece of stronger tim- 



ART. 45 

ber for the middle of the under surface, getting his 
hint from the structure of the shin-bone. 

The first and last lesson of the useful arts is that 
Nature tyrannizes over our works. They must be 
conformed to her law, or they will be ground to 
powder by her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, 
nothing whimsical will endure. Nature is ever in- 
terfering with Art. You cannot build your house 
or pagoda as you will, but as you must. There is 
a quick bound set to your caprice. The leaning 
tower can only lean so far. The verandah or pa- 
goda roof can curve upward only to a certain point. 
The slope of your roof is determined by the weight 
of snow. It is only within narrow limits that the 
discretion of the architect may range : gravity, 
wind, sun, rain, the size of men and animals, and 
such like, have more to say than he. It is the law 
of fluids that prescribes the shape of the boat, — 
keel, rudder, and bows, — and, in the finer fluid 
above, the form and tackle of the sails. Man seems 
to have no option about his tools, but merely the 
necessity to learn from Nature what will fit best, 
as if he were fitting a screw or a door. Beneath a 
necessity thus almighty, what is artificial in man's 
life seems insignificant. He seems to take his task 
so minutely from imitations of Nature, that his 
works become as it were hers, and he is no longer 
free. 



46 ART. 

But if we work witliin this limit, slie yields us 
all her strength. All powerful action is performed 
by bringing the forces of nature to bear upon our 
objects. We do not grind corn or lift the loom by 
our own strength, but we build a mill in such 
position as to set the north wind to play upon our 
instrument, or the elastic force of steam, or the ebb 
and flow of the sea. So in our handiwork, we do 
few things by muscular force, but we place our- 
selves in such attitudes as to bring the force of 
gravity, that is, the weight of the planet, to bear 
upon the spade or the axe we wield. In short, in 
all our operations we seek not to use our own, but 
to bring a quite infinite force to bear. 

Let lis now consider this law as it affects the 
works that have beauty for their end, that is, the 
productions of the Fine Arts. Here again the 
prominent fact is subordination of man. His art 
is the least part of his work of art. A great deduc- 
tion is to be made before we can know his pro^Dcr 
contribution to it. 

Music, Eloquence, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, 
Architecture. This is a rough enumeration of the 
Fine Arts. I omit Rhetoric, which only respects 
the form of eloquence and poetry. Architecture 
and eloquence are mixed arts, whose end is some- 
times beauty and sometimes use. 

It will be seen that in each of these arts there is 



' ART. 47 

much which is not spiritual. Each has a material 
basis, and in each the creating intellect is crippled 
in some degree by the stuff on which it works. 
The basis of poetry is language, which is material 
only on one side. It is a demi-god. But being 
applied primarily to the common necessities of 
man, it is not new-created by the poet for his own 
ends. 

The basis of music is the qualities of the air and 
the vibrations of sonorous bodies. The pulsation 
of a stretched string or wire gives the ear the pleas- 
ure of sweet sound, before yet the musician has 
enhanced this pleasure by concords and combina- 
tions. 

Eloquence, as far as it is a fine art, is modified 
how much by the material organization of the ora- 
tor, the tone of the voice, the physical strength, the 
play of the eye and countenance. All this is so 
much deduction from the purely spiritual pleasure, 
as so much deduction from the merit of Art, and 
is the attribute of Nature. 

In painting, bright colors stimulate the eye be- 
fore yet they are harmonized into a landscape. In 
sculpture and in architecture the material, as mar- 
ble or granite, and in architecture the mass, are 
sources of great pleasure quite independent of the 
artificial arrangement. The art resides in the 
model, in the plan; for it is on that the genius of 



48 ART. 

the artist is expended, not on the statue or the tem- 
ple. Just as much better as is the polished statue 
of dazzling marble than the clay model, or as much 
more impressive as is the granite cathedral or pyr- 
amid than the ground-plan or profile of them on 
paper, so much more beauty owe they to Nature 
than to Art. 

There is a still larger deduction to be made from 
the genius of the artist in favor of Nature than I 
have yet specified. 

A jumble of musical sounds on a viol or a flute, 
in which the rhythm of the tune is played without 
one of the notes being right, gives pleasure to the 
unskilful ear. A very coarse imitation of the hu- 
man form on canvas, or in wax -work; a coarse 
sketch in colors of a landscape, in which imitation 
is all that is attempted, — these things give to un- 
practised eyes, to the uncultured, who do not ask a 
fine spiritual delight, almost as much pleasure as a 
statue of Canova or a picture of Titian. And in 
the statue of Canova or the picture of Titian, these 
give the great part of the pleasure ; they are the 
basis on which the fine spirit rears a higher de- 
light, but to which these are indispensable. 

Another deduction from the genius of the artist 
is what is conventional in his art, of which there is 
much in every work of art. Thus how much is 
there that is not original in every particular build- 



ART. 49 

ing, in every statue, in every tune, painting, poem, 
or harangue ! — whatever is national or usual ; as 
the usage of building all Roman churches in the 
form of a cross, the prescribed distribution of parts 
of a theatre, the custom of draping a statue in 
classical costume. Yet who will deny that the 
merely conventional part of the performance con- 
tributes much to its effect ? 

One consideration more exhausts I believe all 
the deductions from the genius of the artist in any 
given work. This is the adventitious. Thus the 
pleasure that a noble temple gives us is only in 
part owing to the temple. It is exalted by the 
beauty of sunlight, the play of the clouds, the land- 
scape around it, its grouping with the houses, trees, 
and towers in its vicinity. The pleasure of elo- 
quence is in greatest part owing often to the stim- 
ulus of the occasion which produces it, — to the 
magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of 
each by radiating on him the feeling of all. 

The effect of music belongs how much to the 
place, as the church, or the moonlight walk ; or to 
the company ; or, if on the stage, to what went be- 
fore in the play, or to the expectation of what shall 
come after. 

In poetry, " It is tradition more than invention 
that helps the poet to a good fable." The adven- 
titious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater 

VOL. VII. 4 



50 ART. 

delight wliich a verse gives in liappy quotation than 
in the poem. 

it is a curious proof of our conviction that the 
artist does not feel himself to be the parent of his 
work, and is as much surprised at the effect as we, 
that we are so unwilling to impute our best sense of 
any work of art to the author. The highest praise 
we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, 
builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought 
or feeling with which he has inspired us. We hes- 
itate at doing Spenser so great an honor as to 
think that Ixe intended by his allegory the sense we 
affix to it. We grudge to Homer the wide human 
circumspection his commentators ascribe to him. 

Even Shakspeare, of whom we can believe every 
thing, we think indebted to Goethe and to Cole- 
ridge for the wisdom they detect in his Hamlet and 
Antony. Especially have we this infirmity of faith 
in contemporary genius. We fear that Allston 
and Greenough did not foresee and design all the 
effect they produce on us. Our arts are happy 
hits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose 
melody is sweeter than he knows, or like a trav- 
eller surprised by a mountain echo, whose trivial 
word returns to him in romantic thunders. 

In view of these facts, I say that the power of 
Nature predominates over the human will in all 
works of even the fine arts, in all that respects 



ART. 51 

their material and external circumstances. Nature 
paints the best part of the picture, carves the best 
part of the statue, builds the best part of the house, 
and speaks the best part of the oration. For all 
the advantages to which I have adverted are such 
as the artist did not consciously produce. He re- 
lied on their aid, he put himself in the way to re- 
ceive aid from some of them ; but he saw that his 
planting and his watering waited for the sunlight 
of Nature, or were vain. 

Let us proceed to the consideration of the law 
stated in the beginning of this essay, as it affects 
the purely spiritual part of a work of art. 

As, in useful art, so far as it is useful, the work 
must be strictly subordinated to the laws of Nature, 
so as to become a sort of continuation and in no 
wise a contradiction of Nature ; so in art that aims 
at beauty must the parts be subordinated to Ideal 
Nature, and everything individual abstracted, so 
that it shall be the production of the universal 
soul. The artist who is to produce a work which 
is to be admired, not by his friends or his towns- 
people or his contemporaries but by all men, and 
which is to be more beautiful to the eye in propor- 
tion to its culture, must disindividualiz e himselfg 
and be a man of no party and no manner and no 
age, but one through whom the soul of all men cir- 
culates as the common air through his lungs. .He 



52 ART. 

must work in the spirit in which we conceive a 
prophet to speak, or an angel of the Lord to act ; 
that is, he is not to speak his own words, or do his 
own works, or think his own thoughts, but he is 
to be an organ through which the universal mind 
acts. 

In speaking of the useful arts, I pointed to the 
fact that we do not dig, or grind, or hew, by our 
muscular strength, but by bringing the weight of 
the planet to bear on the spade, axe, or bar. Pre- 
cisely analogous to this, in the fine arts, is the man- 
ner of our intellectual work. We aim to hinder 
our individuality from acting. So much as we can 
shove aside our egotism, our prejudice and will, 
and bring the omniscience of reason upon the sub- 
ject before us, so perfect is the work. The won- 
ders of Shakspeare are things which he saw whilst 
he stood aside, and then returned to record them. 
The poet aims at getting observations without aim ; 
to subject to tliought things seen without (volun- 
tary) thought. 

In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are 
when the orator is lifted abovejiimself ; when con- 
sciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the 
occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but 
be said. Hence the term abandonment, to describe 
I the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but 
the principle on which he is horsed, the great con- 



ART. 63 

nection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of 
the crowd. 

In poetry, where every word is free, every word 
is necessary. Good poetry could not have been 
otherwise written than it is. The first time you 
hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some 
invisible tablet in the Eternal mind, than as if ar- 
bitrarily composed by the poet. The feeling of all 
great poets has accorded wdth this. They found 
the verse, not made it. The muse brought it to 
them. 

In sculpture, did ever anybody call the Apollo a 
fancy piece ? Or say of the Laocoon how it might 
be different ? A masterpiece of art has in the 
mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much 
as a plant or a crystal. 

The whole language of men, especially of artists, 
in reference to this subject, points at the belief 
that every work of art, in proportion to its excel- 
lence, partakes of the precision of fate : no room 
was there for choice, no play for fancy ; for in the 
moment or in the successive moments when that 
form w^as seen, the iron lids of Reason were un- 
closed, which ordinarily are heavy with slumber. 
The individual mind became for the moment the 
vent of the mind of humanity. 

There is but one Reason. The mind that made 
^ world is not one mind, but the mind. And 



64 ART. 

every work of art is a more or less pure manifesta- 
tion of the same. Therefore we arrive at this con- 
clusion, which I offer, as a confirmation of the whole 
view, that the delight which a work of art affords, 
seems to arise from our recognizing in it the mind 
that formed Nature, again in active operation. It 
differs from the works of Nature in this, that they 
are organically reproductive. This is not, but 
spiritually it is prolific by its powerful action on 
the intellects of men. 

Hence it follows that a study of admirable works 
of art sharpens our perceptions of the beauty of 
Nature; that a certain analogy reigns throughout 
the wonders of both ; that the contemplation of a 
work of great art draws us into a state of mind 
which may be called religious. It conspires with 
all exalted sentiments. 

Proceeding from absolute mind, whose nature is 
goodness as much as truth, the great works are 
always attuned to moral nature. If the earth and 
sea conspire with virtue more than vice, — so do the 
masterpieces of art. The galleries of ancient sculp- 
ture in Naples and Rome strike no deeper convic- 
tion into the mind than the contrast of the purity, 
the severity expressed in these fine old heads, with 
the frivolity and grossness of the mob that exhibits 
and the mob that gazes at them. These are the 
countenances of the first-born, — the face of man 



ART. 55 

in the morning of the world. No mark is on these 
lofty features of sloth, or luxury, or meanness, and 
they surprise you with a moral admonition, as they 
speak of nothing around you, but remind you of 
the fragrant thoughts and the purest resolutions of 
your youth. 

Herein is the explanation of the analogies which 
exist in all the arts. They are the reappearance of 
one mind, working in many materials to many tem- 
porary ends. Eaphael paints wisdom, Handel sings 
it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren 
builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, 
Washington arms it. Watt mechanizes it. Paint- 
ing was called " silent poetry, " and poetry "speak- 
ing painting." The laws of each art are convert- 
ible into the laws of every other. 

Herein we have an explanation of the necessity 
that reigns in all the kingdom of Art. Arising out 
of eternal Reason, one and perfect, whatever is 
beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary. 
Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. 
It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. 
The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the 
insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the consti- 
tution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an 
accompaniment of beauty, that it has been taken for 
it. The most perfect form to answer an end is so 
far beautiful. We feel, in seeing a noble building, 



56 ART. 

which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect 
song, that it is spiritually organic ; that is, had a 
necessity, in nature, for being ; was one of the pos- 
sible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only 
discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitra- 
rily composed by him. 

And so every genuine work of art has as much 
reason for being as the earth and the smi. The 
gayest charm of beauty has a root in the constitu- 
tion of tilings. The Iliad of Homer, the songs of 
David, the odes of Pindar, the tragedies of ^schy- 
lus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, the 
plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not 
for sport but in grave earnest, in tears and smiles 
of suffering and loving men. 

Viewed from this point the history of Art be- 
comes intelligible, and moreover one of the most 
agreeable studies. We see how each work of art 
sprang irresistibly from necessity, and, moreover, 
took its form from the broad hint of Nature. Beau- 
tiful in this wise is the obvious origin of all the 
known orders of architecture ; namely, that they 
were the idealizing of the primitive abodes of each 
people. There was no wilfulness in the savages in 
this perpetuating of their first rude abodes. The 
first form in which they built a house would be the 
first form of their public and religious edifice also. 
This form becomes immediately sacred in the eyes 



ART, 67 

of their children, and as more traditions cluster 
round it, is imitated with more splendor in each 
succeeding generation. 

In like manner it has been remarked by Goethe 
that the granite breaks into parallelopipeds, which 
broken in two, one part would be an obelisk ; that 
in Upper Egypt the inhabitants would naturally 
mark a memorable spot by setting up so conspicu- 
ous a stone. Again, he suggested, we may see in 
any stone wall, on a fragment of rock, the project- 
ing veins of harder stone which have resisted the 
action of frost and water which has decomposed 
the rest. This appearance certainly gave the hint 
of the hieroglyphics inscribed on their obelisk. The 
amphitheatre of the old Romans, — any one may 
see its origin who looks at the crowd running to- 
gether to see any fight, sickness, or odd appearance 
in the street. The first comers gather round in a 
circle, those behind stand on tiptoe, and farther 
back they climb on fences or window-sills, and so 
make a cup of which the object of attention occu- 
pies the hollow area. The architect put benches 
in this, and enclosed the cup with a wall, — and be- 
hold a Coliseum ! 

It would be easy to show of many fine things in 
the world, — in the customs of nations, the etiquette 
of courts, the constitution of governments, — the 
origin in quite simple local necessities. Heraldry 



58 ART. 

for example, and the ceremonies of a coronation, are 
a dignified repetition of the occurrences that might 
befall a dragoon and his footboy. The College 
of Cardinals were originally the parish priests of 
Rome. The leaning towers originated from the 
civil discords which induced every lord to build a 
tower. Then it became a point of family pride, — 
and for more pride the novelty of a leaning tower 
was built. 

This strict dependence of Art upon material and 
ideal Nature, this adamantine necessity which un- 
derlies it, has made all its past and may foreshow 
its future history. It never was in the power of 
any man or any community to call the arts into 
being. They come to serve his actual wants, never 
to please his fancy. Thes^' arts have their origin 
always in some enthusiasm, as love, patriotism, 
or religion. Who carved marble ? The believing 
man, who wished to symbolize their gods to the 
waiting Greeks. 

The Gothic cathedrals were built when the 
builder and the priest and the people were over- 
powered by their faith. Love and fear laid every 
stone. The Madonnas of Raphael and Titian were 
made to be worshipped. Tragedy was instituted 
for the like purpose, and the miracles of music : all 
sprang out of some genuine enthusiasm, and never 
out of dilettanteism and holidays. Now they Ian- 



ART. 59 

guish, because their purpose is merely exhibition. 
Who cares, who knows what works of art our gov- 
ernment have ordered to be made for the Capitol ? 
They are a mere flourish to please the eye of per- 
sons who have associations with books and galler- 
ies. But in Greece, the Demos of Athens divided 
into political factions upon the merits of Phidias. 

In this country, at this time, other interests than 
religion and patriotism are predominant, and the 
arts, the daughters of enthusiasm, do not flourish. 
The genuine offspring of our ruling passions we 
behold. Popular institutions, the school, the read- 
ing-room, the telegraph, the post-office, the ex- 
change, the insurance-compan}^ and the immense 
harvest of economical inventions, are the fruit of 
the equality and the boundless liberty of lucrative 
callings. These are superficial wants ; and their 
fruits are these superficial institutions. But, as far 
as they accelerate the end of political freedom and 
national education, they are preparing the soil of 
man for fairer flowers and fruits in another age. 
For beau^, truth, and goodness are not obsolete ; 
they spring eternal in the breast of man ; they are 
as indigenous in Massachusetts as in Tuscany or 
the Isles of Greece. And that Eternal Spirit whose 
triple face they are, moulds from them forever, for 
his mortal child, images to remind him of the In- 
finite and Fair. 



ELOQUENCE. 



ELOQUENCE. 



It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters 
that whoever can speak can sing. So probably 
every man is eloquent once in his life. Our tem- 
peraments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at 
different degrees. One man is brought to the boil- 
ing-point by the excitement of conversation in the 
parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep. 
He has a two-inch enthusiasm, a patty-pan ebulli- 
tion. Another requires the additional caloric of 
a multitude and a public debate ; a third needs an 
antagonist, or a hot indignation ; a fourth needs a 
revolution ; and a fifth, nothing less than the grand- 
eur of absolute ideas, the splendors and shades of 
Heaven and Hell. 

But, because every man is an orator, how long 
soever he may have been a mute, an assembly of 
men is so much more susceptible. The eloquence 
of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speak- 
ing-point and all others to a degree that makes 
them good receivers and conductors, and they 
avenge themselves for their enforced silence by in- 
creased loquacity on their return to the fireside. 



64 ELOQUENCE. 

The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better 
than that of those who prematurely boil, and who 
impatiently break silence before their time. Our 
county conventions often exhibit a small-pot-soon- 
hot style of eloquence. We are too much reminded 
of a medical experiment where a series of patients 
are taking nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient in turn 
exhibits similar symptoms, — redness in the face, 
volubility, violent gesticulation, delirious attitudes, 
occasional stamping, an alarming loss of perception 
of the passage of time, a selfish enjoyment of his 
sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferings 
of the audience. 
f Plato says that the punishment which the wise \ 
/ suffer who refuse to take part in the government, \ 
^ is, to live under the government of worse men ; 
and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, 
as the penalty of abstaining to speak, — that they 
Vshall hear worse orators than themselves. \y 

But this lust to speak marks the universal feel- 
ing of the energy of the engine, and the curiosity 
men feel to touch the springs. Of all the musical 
instruments on which men play, a popular assembly 
is that which has the largest compass and variety, 
and out of which, by genius and study, the most 
wonderful effects can be drawn. An audience is 
not a simple addition of the individuals that com- 
pose it. Their sympathy gives them a certain so- 



ELOQUENCE, 65 

cial organism, wliicli fills each member, in his own 
degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a 
battery is charged with the whole electricity of the 
battery. No one can survey the face of an excited 
assembly, without being apprised of new opportu- 
nity for painting in fire human thought, and being 
agitated to agitate. How many orators sit mute 
there below ! They come to get justice done to 
that ear and intuition which no Chatham and no 
Demosthenes has begun to satisfy. 

The Welsh Triads say, " Many are the friends of 
the golden tongue." Who can wonder at the at- 
tractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress, or the 
bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest 
bribes of society are at the feet of the successful 
orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All 
other fames must hush before his. He is the true 
potentate ; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, 
but they who know how to govern. The definitions 
of eloquence describe its attraction for young men. 
Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch's ten 
orators, advertised in Athens " that he would cure 
distempers of the mind with words." No man has 
a prosperity so high or firm but two or three words 
can dishearten it. There is no calamity which 
right words will not begin to redress. Isocrates 
described his art as " the power of magnifying 
what was small and diminishing what was great," 

VOL. vn. 5 



66 ELOQUENCE. 

— an acute but partial definition. Among the 
Spartans, the art assumed a Spartan shape, namely, 
of the sharpest weapon. Socrates says : " If any 
one wishes to converse with the meanest of the 
Lacedaemonians, he will at first find him despica- 
ble in conversation, but when a proper opportunity 
offers, this same person, like a skilful jaculator, 
will hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short and 
contorted, so that he who converses with him will 
appear to be in no respect superior to a boy." 
Plato's definition of rhetoric is, " the art of ruling 
the minds of men." The Koran says, "A mountain 
may change its place, but a man will not change 
his disposition ; " yet the end of eloquence is, — is / 
it not ? — to alter in a pair of hours, perhaps in a 
half -hours' discourse, the convictions and habits of 
years. Young men, too, are eager to enjoy this 
sense of added power and enlarged sympathetic 
existence. The orator sees himself the organ of 
a multitude, and concentrating their valors and 
powers : — 

" But now the blood of twenty thousand men 
Blushed in my face." 

That which he wishes, that which eloquence ought 
to reach, is not a particular skill in telling a story, 
or neatly summing up evidence, or arguing logically, 
or dexterously addressing the prejudice of the com- 
pany, — no, but a taking sovereign possession of 



ELOQUENCE. 67 

tlie audience. Him we call an artist who shall 
play on an assembly of men as a master on the 
keys of the piano, — who, seeing the people furious, 
shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, 
when he will, to laughter and to tears. Bring him 
to his audience, and, be they who they may, — 
coarse or refined, pleased or displeased, sulky or 
savage, with their opinions in the keeping of a con- 
fessor, or with their opinions in their bank-safes, 
— he will have them pleased and humored as he 
chooses ; and they shall carry and execute that 
which he bids them. yi 

This is that despotism which poets have cele- 
brated in the " Pied Piper of Hamelin," whose 
music drew like the power of gravitation, — drew 
soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women 
and boys, rats and mice ; or that of the minstrel of 
Meudon, who made the pall-bearers dance around 
the bier. This is a power of many degrees and 
requiring in the orator a great range of faculty and 
experience, requiring a large composite man, such 
as Nature rarely organizes ; so that in our experi- 
ence we are forced to gather up the figure in frag- 
ments, here one talent and there another. 
' The audience is a constant meter of the orator. 
There are many audiences in every public assembly, 
each one of which rules in turn. If anything comic 
and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence 



68 ELOQUENCE. 

of the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious that 
you might think the house was filled with thepa. 
If new topics are started, graver and higher, these 
roisters recede ; a more chaste and wise attention 
takes place. You would think the boys slept, and 
that the men have any degree of profoundness. If 
the speaker utter a noble sentiment, the attention 
deepens, a new and highest audience now listens, 
and the audiences of the fun and of facts and 
of the understanding are all silenced and awed. 
There is also something excellent in every audi- 
ence, — the capacity of virtue. They are ready to 
be beatified. They know so much more than the 
orator, — and are so just ! There is a tablet there 
for every line he can inscribe, though he should 
mount to the highest levels. Humble persons are 
conscious of new illumination ; narrow brows ex- 
pand with enlarged affections ; — delicate spirits, 
long unknown to themselves, masked and muffled 
in coarsest fortunes, who now hear their own native 
language for the first time, and leap to hear it. 
But all these several audiences, each above each, 
which successively appear to greet the variety of 
style and topic, are really composed out of the 
same persons ; nay, sometimes the same individual 
will take active part in them all, in turn. 

This range of many powers in the consummate 
speaker, and of many audiences in one assembly, 
leads us to consider the successive stages of oratory. 



ELOQUENCE. 69 

Perhaps it is tlie lowest of the qualities of an 
orator, but it is, on so many occasions, of chief im- 
portance, — a certain robust and radiant physical 
health ; or, — shall I say ? — great volumes of animal 
heat. When each auditor feels himself to make 
too large a part of the assembly, and shudders with 
cold at the thinness of the morning audience, and 
with fear lest all will heavily fail through one bad 
speech, mere energy and mellowness are then in- 
estimable. Wisdom and learning would be harsh 
and unwelcome, compared with a substantial cordial 
man, made of milk as we say, who is a house- 
warmer, with his obvious honesty and good mean- 
ing, and a hue-and-cry style of harangue, which 
inundates the assembly with a flood of animal 
spirits, and makes all safe and secure, so that any 
and every sort of good speaking becomes at once 
practicable. I do not rate this animal eloquence 
very highly ; and yet, as we must be fed and 
warmed before we can do any work well, — even 
the best, — so is this semi-animal exuberance, like 
a good stove, of the first necessity in a cold house. 

Climate has much to do with it, — climate and 
race. Set a New-Engiander to describe any acci- 
dent which happened in his presence. What hesi- 
tation and reserve in his narrative ! He tells with 
difficulty some particulars, and gets as fast as he 
can to the result, and, though he cannot describe, 



70 ELOQUENCE. 

hopes to suggest the whole scene. Now listen to 
a poor Irishwoman recounting some experience of 
hers. Her speech flows like a river, — so uncon- 
sidered, so humorous, so pathetic, such justice done 
to all the parts ! It is a true trans-ubstantiation, — 
the fact converted into speech, all warm and colored 
and alive, as it fell out. Our Southern people are 
almost all speakers, and have every advantage over 
the New England people, whose climate is so cold 
that 't is said we do not like to open our mouths 
very wide. But neither can the Southerner in the 
United States, nor the Irish, compare with the 
lively inhabitant of the south of Europe. The 
traveller in Sicily needs no gayer melodramatic 
exhibition than the table cVhote of his inn will af- 
ford him in the conversation of the joyous guests. 
They mimic the voice and manner of the person 
they describe; they crow, squeal, hiss, cackle, bark, 
and scream like mad, and, were it only by the phys- 
ical strength exerted in telling the story, keep the 
table in unbounded excitement. But in every con- 
stitution some large degree of animal vigor is neces- 
sary as material foundation for the higher qualities 
of the art. 

But eloquence must be attractive, or it is none. 
The virtue of books is to be readable, and of ora- 
tors to be interesting ; and this is a gift of Nature ; 
as Demosthenes, the most laborious student in that 



ELOQUENCE. 71 

kind, signified his sense of this necessity when he 
wrote, " Good Fortune," as his motto on his shield. 
As we know, the power of discourse of certain in- 
dividuals amounts to fascination, though it may 
have no lasting effect. Some portion of this sugar 
must intermingle. The right eloquence needs no 
bell to call the people together, and no constable to 
keep them. It draws the children from their play, 
the old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his 
warm chamber : it holds the hearer fast ; steals 
away his feet, that he shall not depart ; his mem- 
ory, that he shall not remember the most pressing 
affairs; his belief, that he shall not admit any 
opposing considerationso The pictures we have of 
it in semi-barbarous ages, when it has some advan- 
tages in the simpler habit of the people, show what 
it aims at. It is said that the Khans or story-teU- 
ers in Ispahan and other cities of the East, attain 
a controlling power over their audience, keeping 
them for many hours attentive to the most fanci- 
ful and extravagant adventures. The whole world 
knows pretty well the style of these improvisators, 
and how fascinating they are, in our translations of 
the " Arabian Nights." Scheherezade tells these 
stories to save her life, and the delight of young 
Europe and young America in them proves that 
she fairly earned it. And who does not remember 
in childhood some white or black or yellow Sche- 



72 ELOQUENCE. 

herezade, who, by that talent of telling endless feats 
of fairies and magicians and kings and queens, was 
more dear and wonderful to a circle of children 
than any orator in England or America is now? 
The more indolent and imaginative complexion of 
the Eastern nations makes them much more im- 
j)ressible by these appeals to the fancy. 

These legends are only exaggerations of real oc- 
currences, and every literature contains these high 
compliments to the art of the orator and the bard, 
from the Hebrew and the Greek down to the Scot- 
tish Glenkindie, who 

" harpit a fish out o' saut-water, 
Or water out of a stone, 
Or milk out of a maiden's breast 
Who bairn had never none." 

Homer specially delighted in drawing the same 
figure. For what is the Odyssey but a history 
of the orator, in the largest style, carried through 
a series of adventures furnishing brilliant oppor- 
tunities to his talent ? See with what care and 
pleasure the poet brings him on the stage. Helen 
is pointing out to Priam, from a tower, the different 
Grecian chiefs. " The old man asked : ' Tell me, 
dear child, who is that man, shorter by a head than 
Agamemnon, yet he looks broader in his shoulders 
and breast. His arms lie on the ground, but he, 
like a leader, walks about the bands of the men. 



I 



ELOQUENCE. 73 

He seems to me like a stately ram, who goes as 
a master of the flock.' Him answered Helen, 
daughter of Jove, 'This is the wise Ulysses, son 
of Laertes, who was reared in the state of craggy 
Ithaca, knowing all wiles and wise counsels.' To 
her the prudent Antenor replied again : ' O woman, 
you have spoken truly. For once the wise Ulysses 
came hither on an embassy, with Menelaus, beloved 
by Mars. I received them and entertained them at 
my house. I became acquainted with the genius 
and the prudent judgments of both. When they 
mixed with the assembled Trojans, and stood, 
the broad shoulders of Menalaus rose above the 
other ; but, both sitting, Ulysses was more majestic. 
When they conversed, and interweaved stories and 
opinions with all, Menelaus spoke succinctly, — few 
but very sweet words, since he v>^as not talkative 
nor superfluous in speech, and was the younger. 
But when the wise Ulysses arose and stood and 
looked down, fixing his eyes on the ground, and 
neither moved his sceptre backward nor forward, 
but held it still, like an awkward person, you would 
say it was some angry or foolish man ; but when he 
sent his great voice forth out of his breast, and his 
words fell like the winter snows, not then would 
any mortal contend with Ulysses ; and we, behold- 
ing, wondered not afterwards so much at his as- 
pect.' " 1 Thus he does not fail to arm Ulysses at 
1 Hiad, III. 191. 



74 ELOQUENCE. 

first with this power of overcoming all opposition 
by the blandishments of speech. Plutarch tells us 
that Thucydides, when Archidamus, king of Sparta, 
asked him which was the best wrestler, Pericles 
or he, replied, " When I throw him, he says he 
was never down, and he persuades the very spec- 
tators to believe him." Philip of Macedon said of 
Demosthenes, on hearing the report of one of his 
orations, " Had I been there, he would have per- 
suaded me to take up arms against myself ; " and 
Warren Hastings said of Burke's speech on his 
impeachment, " As I listened to the orator, I felt 
for more than half an hour as if I were the most 
culpable being on earth." 

In these examples, higher qualities have already 
entered, but the power of detaining the ear by 
pleasing speech, and addressing the fancy and im- 
agination, often exists without higher merits. Thus 
separated, as this fascination of discourse aims only 
at amusement, though it be decisive in its momen- 
tary effect, it is yet a juggle, and of no lasting 
power. It is heard like a band of music passing 
through the streets, which converts all the passen- 
gers into poets, but is forgotten as soon as it has 
turned the next corner ; and unless this oiled tongue 
could, in Oriental phrase, lick the sun and moon 
away, it must take its place with opium and 
brandy. I know no remedy against it but cotton- 



ELOQUENCE. 75 

wool, or the wax which Ulysses stuffed into the 
ears of his sailors to pass the Sireiis safely. 

There are all degrees of power, and the least 
are interesting, but they must not be confounded. 
There is the glib tongue and cool self-possession of 
the salesman in a large shop, which, as is well 
known, overpower the prudence and resolution of 
housekeepers of both sexes. There is a petty law- 
yer's fluency, which is sufficiently impressive to 
him who is devoid of that talent, though it be, in 
so many cases, nothing more than a facility of ex- 
pressing with accuracy and speed what everybody 
thinks and says more slowly ; without new informa- 
tion, or precision of thought, but the same thing, 
neither less nor more. It requires no special in- 
sight to edit one of our country newspapers. Yet 
whoever can say off currently, sentence by sentence, 
matter neither better nor worse than what is there 
printed, will be very impressive to our easily 
pleased population. These talkers are of that class 
who prosper, like the celebrated schoolmaster, by 
being only one lesson ahead of the pupil. Add a 
little sarcasm and prompt allusion to passing oc- 
currences, and you have the mischievous member 
of Congress. A spice of malice, a ruffian touch in 
his rhetoric, will do him no harm with his audience. 
These accomplishments are of the same kind, and 
only a degree higher than the coaxing of the auc- 



76 ELOQUENCE. 

tioneer, or the vituperative style well described in 
the street-word "jawing." These kinds of public 
and private speaking have their use and conven- 
ience to the practitioners ; but we may say of such 
collectively that the habit of oratory is apt to dis- 
qualify them for eloquence. 

One of our statesmen said, " The curse of this 
country is eloquent men." And one cannot wonder 
at the uneasiness sometimes manifested by trained 
statesmen, with large experience of public affairs, 
when they observe the disproportionate advantage 
suddenly given to oratory over the most solid and 
accumulated public service. In a Senate or other 
business committee, the solid result depends on a 
few men with working-talent. They know how to 
deal with the facts before them, to put things into 
a practical shape, and they value men only as they 
can forward the work. But a new man comes 
there who has no capacity for helping them at all, 
is insignificant, and nobody in the committee, but 
has a talent for speaking. In the debate with open 
doors, this precious person makes a speech which 
is printed and read all over the Union, and he at 
once becomes famous, and takes the lead in the 
public mind over all these executive men, who, of 
course, are full of indignation to find one v/ho has 
no tact or skill and knows he has none, put over 
them by means of this talking-power which they 
despise. 



ELOQUENCE. 77 

Leaving behind us these pretensions, better or 
worse, to come a little nearer to the verity, — elo- 
quence is attractive as an example of the magic of 
personal ascendency, — a total and resultant power, 
rare, because it requires a rich coincidence of 
powers, intellect, will, sympathy, organs, and, over 
all, good fortune in the cause. We have a half- 
belief that the person is possible who can counter- 
poise all other persons. We believe that there 
may be a man who is a match for events, one who 
never found his match, against whom other men 
being dashed are broken, — one of inexhaustible 
personal resources, who can give you any odds and 
beat you. What we really wish for is a mind--*-^" 
equal to any exigency. You are safe in your rural 
district, or in the city, in broad daylight, amidst 
the police, and under the eyes of a hundred thou- 
sand people. But how is it on the Atlantic, in a 
storm, — do you understand how to infuse your rea- 
son into men disabled by terror, and to bring your- 
self off safe then ? — how among thieves, or among 
an infuriated populace, or among cannibals ? Face 
to face with a highwayman who has every tempta- 
tion and opportunity for violence and plunder, can 
you bring yourself off safe by your wit exercised 
through speech ? — a problem easy enough to Cae- 
sar or Napoleon. Whenever a man of that stamp 
arrives, the highwayman has found a master. Wliat 



78 ELOQUENCE. 

a difference between men in power of face ! A 
man succeeds because he has more power of eye 
than another, and so coaxes or confounds him. 
I The newspapers, every week, report the adventures 
j of some impudent swindler, who, by steadiness of 
I carriage, duped those who should have known bet- 
ter. Yet any swindlers we have known are novices 
and bunglers, as is attested by their ill name. A 
' greater power of face would accomplish anytliing, 
and, with the rest of their takings, take away the 
bad name. A greater power of carrying the thing,-*^^ 
loftily and with perfect assurance, would confound 
merchant, banker, judge, men of influence and 
power, poet and j)resident, and might head any 
; party, unseat any sovereign, and abrogate any con- 
V stitution in Europe and America. It was said that 
a man has at one step attained vast power, who 
has renounced his moral sentiment, and settled it 
with himself that he will no longer stick at any- 
thing. It was said of Sir William PejDperel, one 
of the worthies of New England, that, " put him 
where you might, he commanded, and saw what he 
willed come to pass." Julius Caesar said to Metel- 
lus, when that tribune interfered to hinder him 
from entering the Roman treasury, " Young man, 
it is easier for me to put you to death than to say 
that I will ; " and the youth yielded. In earlier 
days, he was taken by pirates. What then ? He 



ELOQUENCE. 79 

threw himself into their ship, established the most 
extraordinary intimacies, told them stories, de- 
claimed to them ; if they did not applaud his 
speeches, he threatened them with hanging, — 
which he performed afterwards, — and, in a short 
time, was master of all on board, f A man this is | 
who cannot be disconcerted, and so can never play / 
his last card, but has a reserve of power when he / 
has hit his mark. With a serene face, he subverts 
a kingdom. What is told of him is miraculous ; 
it affects men so. The confidence of men in him 
is lavish, and he changes the face of the world, and 
histories, poems, and new philosophies arise to ac- 
count for him. A supreme commander over all 
his passions and affections ; but the secret of his 
ruling is higher than that. It is the power of Na- 
ture running without impediment from the brain 
and will into the hands. ! Men and women are his 
game. Where they are, he cannot be without re- 
source. "Whoso can speak well," said Luther, 
" is a man." It was men of this stamp that the 
Grecian States used to ask of Sparta for generals. 
They did not send to Lacedsemon for troops, but 
they said, "Send us a commander;" and Pausa- 
nias, or Gylippus, or Brasidas, or Agis, was de- 
spatched by the Ephors. 

It is easy to illustrate this overpowering person- 
ality by these examples of soldiers and kings ; but 



80 ELOQUENCE. 

there are men of the most peaceful way of life and 
peaceful principle, who are felt wherever they go, 
as sensibly as a July sun or a December frost, — 
men who, if they speak, are heard, though they 
speak in a whisper, — who, when they act, act ef- 
fectually, and what they do is imitated ; and these 
examples may be found on very humble platforms 
as well as on high ones. 

In old countries a high money-value is set on 
the services of men who have achieved a personal 
distinction. ■ He who has points to carry must hire, 
not a skilful attorney, but a commanding person. A 
barrister in England is reputed to have made thirty 
or forty thousand pounds per annum in represent- 
ing the claims of railroad companies before commit- 
tees of the House of Commons. His clients pay not 
so much for legal as for manly accomplishments, — 
for courage, conduct, and a commanding social po- 
sition, which enable him to make their claims heard 
and respected, j 

I know very well that among our cool and cal- 
culating people, where every man mounts guard 
over hiQiself, where heats and panics and abandon- 
ments are quite out of the system, there is a good 
deal of scepticism as to extraordinary influence. 
To talk of an overpowering mind rouses the same 
jealousy and defiance which one may observe round 
a table where anybody is recounting the marvellous 



ELOQUENCE. 81 

anecdotes of mesmerism. Eacli auditor puts a final 
stroke to the discourse by exclaiming, " Can lie 
mesmerize me F " So each man inquires if any 
orator can change Ms convictions. 

But does any one suppose himself to be quite 
impregnable ? Does he think that not possibly a 
man may come to him who shall persuade him out 
of his most settled determination ? — for example 
good sedate citizen as he is, to make a fanatic of 
him, — or, if he is penurious, to squander money for 
some purpose he now least thinks of, — or, if he is 
a i^rudent, industrious person, to forsake his work, 
and give days and weeks to a new interest ? No, 
he defies any one, every one. Ah ! he is thinking^ 
/ of resistance, and of a different turn from his own. ' 
/ But what if one should come of the same turn of J 
t mind as his own, and who sees much farther on his] 
j own way than he ? (A man who has tastes like ; 
I mine, but in greater power, will rule me any day,/ 
\ and make me love my ruler. ^ 

Thus it is not powers of speech that we primarily 
consider under this word eloquence^ but the power 
that being present, gives them their perfection, 
and being absent, leaves them a merely superficial 
value. Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the 
highest personal energy. Personal ascendency may- 
exist with or without adequate talent for its expres- 
sion. It is as surely felt as a mountain or a planet ; 

VOL. VII. 6 



82 ELOQUENCE, 

but when it is weaponed witli a power of speech, it 
seems first to become truly human, works activel}^ 
in all directions, and supplies the imagination with 
fine materials. 

This circumstance enters into every considera- 
tion of the power of orators, and is the key to all 
their effects. In the assembly, you shall find the 
orator and the audience in perpetual balance ; and 
the predominance of either is indicated by the 
choice of topic. If the talents for sjieaking exist, 
but not the strong personality, then there are good 
speakers who perfectly receive and express the will 
of the audience, and the commonest populace is 
flattered by hearing its low mind returned to it 
with every ornament which happy talent can add. 
But if there be personality in the orator, the face 
of things changes. The audience is thrown into 
the attitude of pupil, follows like a child its pre- 
ceptor, and hears what he has to say. It is as 
if, amidst the king's council at Madrid, Ximenes 
urged that an advantage might be gained of France, 
and Mendoza that Flanders might be kept down, 
and Columbus, being introduced, was interrogated 
whether his geographical knowledge could aid the 
cabinet ; and he can say nothing to one party or to 
the other, but he can show how all Europe can be 
diminished and reduced under the king, by annex- 
ing to Spain a continent as large as six or seven 
Europes. 



ELOQUENCE. 83 

This balance between the orator and the audi- 
ence is expressed in what is called the J2ertin£nce_ 
of the speaker. There is always a rivalry between 
the orator and the occasion, between the demands 
of the hour and the prepossession of the individual. 
The emergency which has convened the meeting is 
usually of more importance than anything the de- 
baters have in their minds, and therefore becomes 
imperative to them. But if one of them have any- 
thing of commanding necessity in his heart, how 
speedily he will find vent for it, and with the ap- 
plause of the assembly ! This balance is observed 
in the privatest intercourse. Poor Tom never knew 
I the time when the present occurrence was so trivial 
that he could tell what was passing in his mind 
without being checked for unseasonable speech ; but 
let Bacon speak and wise men would rather listen | 
though the revolution of kingdoms was on foot. 1 
I have heard it reported of an eloquent preacher, 
whose voice is not yet forgotten in this city, that, 
on occasions of death or tragic disaster which over- 
spread the congregation with gloom, he ascended 
the pulpit with more than his usual alacrity, and 
turning to his favorite lessons of devout and jubi- 
lant thankfulness, — " Let us praise the Lord," — 
carried audience, mourners, and mourning along 
with him, and swept away all the impertinence 
of private sorrow with his hosannas and songs of 



84 ELOQUENCE. 

praise. Pepys says of Lord Clarendon (with whom 
" he is mad in love ") on his return from a con- 
ference, " I did never observe how much easier a 
man do speak when he knows all the company to 
be below him, than in him ; for, though he spoke 
indeed excellent well, yet his manner and freedom 
of doing it, as if he played with it, and was inform- 
ing only all the rest of the company, was mighty 
pretty." i 
— This rivalry between the orator and the occasion 



is inevitable, and the occasion always yields to the 
eminence of the speaker; for a great man is the 
greatest of occasions. Of course the interest of the 
audience and of the orator conspire. It is well 
with them only when his influence is complete ; 
then only they are well pleased. Especially he 
consults his power by making instead of taking his 
theme. If he should attempt to instruct the people 
in that which they already know, he would fail ; 
but by making them wise in that which he knows, 
he has the advantage of the assembly every mo- 
ment. Napoleon's tactics of marching on the angle 
of an army, and always presenting a superiority of 
numbers, is the orator's secret also. 

The several talents which the orator employs, the 
splendid weapons which went to the equipment of 
Demosthenes, of ^schines, of Demades the natural 
1 Diary, I. 169. 



ELOQUENCE. 85 

orator, of Fox, of Pitt, of Patrick Henry, of Adams, 
of Mirabeau, deserve a special enumeration. We 
must not quite omit to name the principal pieces. 

The orator, as we have seen, must be a substan 
tial personality. Then, first, he must have power 
of statement, — must have the fact, and know how 
to tell it. In any knot of men conversing on any 
subject, the person who knows most about it will 
have the ear of the company if he wishes it, and 
lead the conversation, no matter what genius or 
distinction other men there present may have ; and 
in any public assembly, him who has the facts and 
can and will state them, people will listen to, though 
he is otherwise ignorant, though he is hoarse and 
ungraceful, though he stutters and screams. 

In a court of justice the audience are impartial ; 
they really wish to sift the statements and know 
what the truth is. And in the examination of wit- 
nesses there usually leap out, quite unexpectedly, 
three or four stubborn words or phrases which are 
the pith and fate of the business, which sink into 
the ear of all parties, and stick there, and determine 
tlie cause. All the rest is repetition and qualify- 
ing ; and the court and the county have really come 
together to arrive at these three or four memorable 
expressions which betrayed the mind and meaning 
of somebody. 

In every company the man with the fact is like 



86 ELOQUENCE. 

the guide you hire to lead your party up a moun- 
tain, or through a difficult country. He may not 
compare with any of the party in mind, or breed- 
ing, or courage, or possessions, but he is much 
more important to the present need than any of 
them. That is what we go to the court-house for, 
— the statement of the fact, and of a general fact, 
the real relation of all the parties ; and it is the 
certainty with which, indifferently in any affair 
that is well handled, the truth stares us in the face 
through all the disguises that are put upon it, — a 
piece of the well-known human life, — that makes 
the interest of a court-room to the intelligent spec- 
tator. 

I remember long ago being attracted, by the dis- 
tinction of the counsel and the local importance 
of the cause, into the court-room. The prisoner's 
counsel were the strongest and cunningest lawyers 
in the Commonwealth. They drove the attorney 
for the State from corner to corner, taking his rea- 
sons from under him, and reducing him to silence, 
but not to submission. When hard pressed, he re- 
venged himself, in his turn, on the judge, by re- 
quiring the court to define what scdvage was. The 
court, thus pushed, tried words, and said every 
thing it could think of to fill the time, supposing 
cases, and describing duties of insurers, captains, 
pilots, and miscellaneous sea-officers that are or 



ELOQUENCE. 87 

might be, — like a sclioolmaster puzzled by a hard 
sum, who reads the context with emphasis. But 
all this flood not serving the cuttle-fish to get away 
in, the horrible shark of the district-attorney being 
still there, grimly awaiting with his *' The court 
must define," — the poor court pleaded its inferi- 
ority. The superior court must establish the law 
for this, and it read away piteously the decisions 
of the Supreme Court, but read to those who had 
no pity. The judge was forced at last to rule some- 
thing, and the lawyers saved their rogue under the 
fog of a definition. The parts were so well cast 
and discriminated that it was an interesting game 
to watch. The government was well enough rep- 
resented. It was stupid, but it had a strong will 
and possession, and stood on that to the last. The 
judge had a task beyond his prej)aration, yet his 
position remained real : he was there to represent a 
great reality, — the justice of states, which we could 
well enough see beetling over his head, and which 
his trifling talk nowise affected, and did not im- 
pede, since he was entirely well-meaning. 

The statement of the fact, however, sinks before 
the statement of the law, which requires immeasur- 
ably higher powers, and is a rarest gift, being in 
all great masters one and the same thing, — in 
lawyers nothing technical, but always some piece 
of common-sense, alike interesting to laymen as 



88 ELOQUENCE. 

to clerks. Lord Mansfield's merit is tlie merit of 
common-sense. It is the same quality we admire 
in Aristotle, Montaigne, Cervantes, or in Samuel 
Jolmson, or Franklin. Its application to law 
seems quite accidental. Eacli of Mansfield's fa- 
mous decisions contains a level sentence or two 
wliicli hit the mark. His sentences are not always 
finished to the eye, but are finished to the mind. 
The sentences are involved, but a solid proposition 
is set forth, a true distinction is drawn. They come 
from and they go to the sound human understand- 
ing; and I read without surprise that the black- 
letter lawyers of the day sneered at his " equitable 
decisions," as if they were not also learned. This, 
indeed, is what speech is for, — to make the state- 
ment ; and all that is called eloquence seems to me 
of little use for the most part to those who have it, 
but inestimable to such as have something to say. 

Next to the knowledge of the fact and its law is 
method, which constitutes the genius and efficiency 
of all remarkable men. A crowd of men go up to 
Faneuil Hall ; they are all pretty well acquainted 
with the object of the meeting ; they have all read 
the facts in the same newspapers. The orator pos- 
sesses no information which his hearers have not, 
yet he teaches them to see the thing with his eyes. 
By the new placing, the circumstances acquire new 
solidity and worth. Every fact gains consequence 



ELOQUENCE. 89 

by his naming it, and trifles become important. 
His expressions fix themselves in men's memories, 
and fly from mouth to mouth. His mind has some 
new principle of order. Where he looks, all things 
fly into their places. What will he say next ? Let 
this man speak, and this man only. By applying 
the habits of a higher style of thought to the com- 
mon affairs of this world, he introduces beauty and 
magnificence wherever he goes. Such a power was 
Burke's, and of this genius we have had some brill- 
iant examples in our own political and legal men. 

Imagery. The orator must be, to a certain ex- 
tent, a poet. We are such imaginative creatures 
that nothing so works on the human mind, barba- 
rous or qivil, as a trope. Condense some daily ex- 
perience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is 
electrified. They feel as if they already possessed 
some new right and power over a fact which they 
can detach, and so completely master in thought. 
It is a wonderful aid to the memory, which carries 
away the image and never loses it. A popular as- 
sembly, like the House of Commons, or the French 
Chamber, or the American Congress, is commanded 
by these two powers, — first by a fact, then by skill 
of statement. Put the argument into a concrete 
shape, into an image, — some hard phrase, round 
and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle 
and carry home with them, — and the cause is half 
won. 



90 ELOQUENCE. 

Statement, method, imagery, selection, tenacity 
of memory, power of dealing with facts, of illumi- 
nating them, of sinking them by ridicule or by 
diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, 
pathos, are keys which the orator holds ; and yet 
these fine gifts are not eloquence, and do often hin- 
der a man's attainment of it. And if we come to 
the heart of the mystery, perhaps we should say 
that the truly eloquent man is a sane man with 
power to communicate his sanity. If you arm the 
man with the extraordinary weapons of this art, 
give him a grasp of facts, learning, quick fancy, sar- 
casm, splendid allusion, interminable illustration, — 
all these talents, so potent and charming, have an 
equal power to insnare and mislead the audience 
and the orator. His talents are too miich for him, 
his horses run away with him ; and people always 
perceive whether you drive or whether the horses 
take the bits in their teeth and run. But these tal- 
ents are quite something else when they are subor- 
dinated and serve him ; and we go to Washington, 
or to "Westminster Hall, or might well go round 
the world, to see a man who drives, and is not run 
away with, — a man who, in prosecuting great de- 
signs, has an absolute command of the means of 
representing his ideas, and uses them only to ex- 
press these ; placing facts, placing men ; amid the 
inconceivable levity of human beings, never for 



ELOQUENCE. 91 

an instant warped from his erectness. There is 
for every man a statement possible of that truth 
which he is most unwilling to receive, — a state- 
ment possible, so broad and so pungent that he 
cannot get away from it, but m.ust either bend to 
it or die of it. Else there would be no such word 
as eloquence, which means this. The listener can- 
not hide from himself that something has been 
shown hiili and the whole world which he did not 
wish to see ; and as he cannot dispose of it, it dis- 
poses of him. The history of public men and af- 
fairs in America will readily furnish tragic exam- 
ples of this fatal force. 

For the triumphs of the art somewhat more must 
still be required, namely a reinforcing of man from 
events, so as to give the double force of reason and 
destiny. In transcendent eloquence, there was ever 
some crisis in affairs, such as could deeply engage 
the man to the cause he pleads, and draw all this 
wide power to a point. For the explosions and 
eruptions, there must be accumulations of heat 
somewhere, beds of ignited anthracite at the centre. 
And in cases where profound conviction has been 
wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beauti- 
ful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a cer- 
tain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps 
almost bereaves him of the power of articulation. 
Then it rushes from him as in short, abrupt screams, 



92 ELOQUENCE. 

in torrents of meaning. The possession the subject 
has of his mind is so entire that it insures an order 
of expression which is the order of Nature itself, 
and so the order of greatest force, and inimitable 
by any art. And the main distinction between 
him and other well-graced actors is the conviction, 
communicated by every word, that his mind is con- 
templating a whole, and inflamed by the contem- 
plation of the whole, and that the words and sen- 
tences uttered by him, however admirable, fall from 
him as unregarded parts of that terrible whole 
wliich he sees and which he means that you shall 
see. Add to this concentration a certain regnant 
calmness, which, in all the tumult, never utters 
a premature syllable, but keeps the secret of its 
^'^ means and method; and the orator stands before 
^ the people as a demoniacal power to whose miracles 

they have no key. This terrible earnestness makes 
/good the ancient superstition of the hunter, that 
' the bullet will hit its mark, which is first dij)i3ed in 
the marksman's blood. 

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest 
narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it 
exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks 
only through the most poetic forms ; but, first and 
last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement 
of fact. The orator is thereby an orator, that he 
keeps his feet ever on a fact. Thus only is he in- 



ELOQUENCE. 93 

vincible. No gifts, no graces, no power of wit or 
learning or illustration will make any amends for 
want of this. All audiences are just to this point. 
Fame of voice or of rhetoric will carry people a 
few times to hear a speaker ; but they soon begin 
to ask, " What is he driving at ? " and if this man 
does not stand for anything, he will be deserted. 
A good upholder of anything which they believe, a 
■^act-speaker of any kind, they will long follow ; 
but a pause in the speaker's own character is very 
properly a loss of attraction. The preacher enu- 
merates his classes of men and I do not find my 
place therein ; I suspect then that no man does. 
Everything is my cousin ; and whilst he speaks 
things, I feel that he is touching some of my rela- 
tions, and I am uneasy ; but whilst he deals in 
words we are released from attention. If you 
v/ould lift me you must be on higher ground. If 
you would liberate me you must be free, (if you 
would correct my false view of facts, — hold up to 
me the same facts in the true order of thought, and 
I cannot go back from the new conviction. ) 

The power of Chatham, of Pericles, of Luther, 
rested on this strength of character,(which, because 
it did not and could not fear anybody, made noth- 
ing of their antagonists, land became sometimes 
exquisitely provoking and sometimes terrific to 
these. 



94 ELOQUENCE. 

We are slenderly furnished with anecdotes of 
these men, nor can we help ourselves by those 
heavy books in which their discourses are reported. 
Some of them were writers, like Burke ; but most 
of them were not, and no record at all adequate 
to their fame remains. (^Besides, what is best is 
lost, — the fiery life of the moment.N But the con- 
ditions for eloquence always exist. It is always 
dying out of famous places and appearing in cor- 
ners. |Wlierever the polarities meet, wherever the 
fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and 
duty, come in direct opposition to fossil conserva- 
tism and the thirst of gain, the spark will passj/ 
The resistance to slavery in this country has been 
a fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connec- 
tion by which it drew to itself a train of moral re- 
forms, and the slight yet sufficient party organiza- 
tion it offered, reinforced the city with new blood 
from the woods and mountains. C Wild men, John 
Baptists, Hermit Peters, John Knoxes, utter the 
savage sentiment of Nature in the heart of commer- 
cial capitals. They send us every year some piece 
of aboriginal strength, some tough oak-stick of a 
man who is not to be silenced or insulted or intimi- 
dated by a mob, because he is more mob than they,'^ 
— one who mobs the mob, — some sturdy country- 
man, on whom neither money, nor politeness, nor 
hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats, 



ELOQUENCE. 95 

make any impression. He is fit to meet tlie bar- 
room wits and bullies ; he is a wit and a bvdly him- 
self, and something more : he is a graduate of the 
plough, and the stub-hoe, and the bushwhacker; 
knows all the secrets of swamp and snow-bank, and 
has nothing to learn of labor or poverty or the 
rough of farming.j His hard head went through, 
in childhood, the drill of Calvinism, with text and 
mortification, so that he stands in the New Eng- 
land assembly a purer bit of New England than 
any, and flings his sarcasms right and left. He 
has not only the documents in his pocket to answer 
all cavils and to prove all his positions,(but he has 
the eternal reason in his head.j This man scorn- 
fully renounces your civil organizations, — county, 
or city, or governor, or army ; — is his own navy 
and artillery, judge and jury, legislature and exec- 
utive. I He has learned his lessons in a bitter 
school.) (^Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear 
it, the best university that can be recommended to 
a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.) 
/ He who will train himself to master}^ in this 

/ science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of ed- 
ucation, not on popular arts, but on cliaracter and 
i nsight. vJLet him see that his speech is not differ- 
enced from action ; that when he has spoken he has 
not done nothing, nor done wrong, but has cleared 

1^ his own skirts, has engaged himself to wholesome 



96 ELOQUENCE. 

exertion. ^ Let liim look on op positio n as opportu- 
nitj. ) He cannot be defeated or put down. There 
is a principle of resurrection in liim, an immortality 
of purpose. Men are averse and hostile, to give 
value to their suffrages. It is not the people that 
are in fault for not being convinced, but he that 
cannot convince them. (He should mould them, 
armed as he is with the reason and love which are 
also the core of their nature. He is not to neutral- 
ize their opposition, but he is to convert them into 
fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.j 
/ The highest platform of eloquence is the moral 
sentiment. It is what is called affirmative truth, 
and has the property of invigorating the hearer; 
and it conveys a hint of our eternity, when he 
feels himself addressed on grounds which will re- 
main when everything else is taken, and which have 
no trace of time or place or party. ) Everything 
hostile is stricken down in the j^resence of the sen- 
timents ; their majesty is felt by the most obdurate. 
It is observable that as soon as one acts for large 
masses, the moral element will and must be allowed 
for, will and must work ; and the men least accus- 
tomed to appeal to these sentiments invariably re- 
call them when they address nations. Napoleon, 
even, must accept and use it as he can. > 
/ It is only to these simple strokes that the highest 
power belongs, — when a weak human hand touches, 



ELOQUENCE. 97 

point by point, the eternal beams and rafters on 
which the whole structure of Nature and society is 
laid. ) In this tossing sea of delusion we feel with 
our feet the adamant ; in this dominion of chance 
we find a principle of permanence./^ For I do not 
accept that definition of Isocrates, that the office of 
his art is to make the great small 'and the small 
great ; but I esteem this to be its perfection, — 
when the orator sees through all masks to the eter- 
nal scale of truth, in such sort that he can hold up 
before the eyes of men the fact of to-day steadily 
to that standard, thereby making the great great, 
and the^mall small, which is the true way to aston- 
ish and to reform mankind. ) 

/ All the chief orators of the world have been 
grave men, relying on this reality. One thought 
the philosophers of Demosthenes's own time found 
running through all his orations, — this namely, 
that " virtue secures its own success." " To stand 
on one's own feet " Heeren finds the key-note^ 
the discourses of Demosthenes, as of Chatham. 

v.. 

a Eloquence, like every other art, rests on laws the 
most exact and determinate. It is the best speech 
of the best soul. It may well stand as the exponent 
of all that is grand and immortal in the mind.\. If 
it do not so become an instrument, but aspires to be 
somewhat of itself, and to glitter for show, it is 
false and weak."^ In its right exercise, it Is' an elas- 




98 ELOQUENCE. 

tic, unexhausted power, — who has sounded, who 
has estimated it ? — expanding with the expansion 
of our interests and affections. Its great masters, 
whilst they valued every help to its attainment, and 
thought no pains too great which contributed in 
any manner to further it, — resembling the Arabian 
warrior of fame, who wore seventeen weapons in 
his belt, and in personal combat used them all oc- 
casionally, — (yet subordinated all means ; nejver 
» permitted any talent — neither voice, rhyBim, po- 
etic power, anecdote, sarcasm — to appear for show|^ 
but were grave men, who preferred their integrity 
,, ■ to their talent, and esteemed that object for which \ 
[ / the^ *2itei whether the prosperity of their country, I 

I j or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech / 

II or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the / i 
I \ whole world, and themselves also. } J j 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 



The perfection of the providence for childhood \ 
is easily acknowledged. The care which covers the \ 
seed of the tree under tough husks and stony cases | 
provides for the human plant the mother's breast f 
and the father's house. The size of the nestler is f 
comic, and its tiny beseeching weakness is compen- \ 
sated perfectly by the happy patronizing look of 
the mother, who is a sort of high reposing Provi- 
dence toward it. Welcome to the parents the puny 
struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms 
more irresistible than the soldier's, his lips touched 
with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in 1 
manhood had not. His imaffected lamentations 
when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beauti- 
ful, the sobbing child, — the face all liquid grief, 
as he tries to swallow his vexation, — soften all 
hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous com- 
passion. The small despot asks so little that all ^ 
reason and all nature are on his side. His igno- ; 
ranee is more charming than all knowledge, and his 
little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His 



102 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

flesh is angels' flesh, all alive. "Infancy^ said 
Coleridge, " presents body a nd spirit in unity : the 
body is all animated." All day, between his three 
or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters 
and spurs and i3uts on his faces of importance ; 
and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to 
sound his trumpet before him. By lamplight he 
delights in shadows on the wall; by daylight, in 
yellow and scarlet. Carry him out of doors, — he is 
overpowered by the light and by the extent of nat- 
ural objects, and is silent. Then presently begins 
his use of his fingers, and he studies power, the les- 
son of his race. First it appears in no great harm, 
in architectural tastes. Out of blocks, thread- 
spools, cards, and checkers, he will build his pyra- 
mid with the gravity of Palladio. With an acous- 
tic apparatus of whistle and rattle he explores the 
laws of sound. But chiefly, like his senior country- 
men, the young American studies new and speedier 
modes of transportation. Mistrusting the cmniing 
of his small legs, he wishes to ride on the necks 
and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter 
nothing can withstand, — no ' seniority of age, no 
gravity of character; uncles, aunts, grandsires, 
grandams, fall an easy prey : he conforms to no^ 
Jaody, all conform to him ; all caper and make 
mouths and babble and chirrup to him. On the 
strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls the hair of 
laurelled heads. 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 103 

" The chilcLbood," said Milton, " shows the man, 
as morning shows the day." The child realizes to 
every man his own earliest remembrance, and so 
supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to 
live over the unconscious history with a sympathy 
so tender as to be almost personal experience. 

Fast — almost too fast for the wistful curiosity of 
the parents, studious of the witchcraft of curls and 
dimples and broken words — the little talker grows 
to a boy. He walks daily among wonders : fire, 
light, darkness, the moon, the stars, the furniture of 
the house, the red tin horse, the domestics, who like 
rude foster-mothers befriend and feed him, the faces 
that claim his kisses, are all in turn absorbing ; yet 
warm, cheerful, and Avith good appetite the little 
sovereign subdues them without knowing it ; the 
new knowledge is taken up into the life of to-day 
and becomes the means of more. The blowing 
rose is a new event ; the garden full of flowers is 
Eden over again to the small Adam ; the rain, the 
ice, the frost, make epochs in his life. What a 
holiday is the first snow in which Twoshoes can be 
trusted abroad I 

What art can paint or gild any object in after- 
life with the glow which Nature gives to the first 
baubles of childhood ! St. Peter's can not have the 
magical power over us that the red and gold covers 
of our first picture-book possessed. How the im- 



104 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

agination cleaves to the warm glories of that tinsel 
even now ! What entertainments make every day 
brifrht and short for the fine freshman ! The street 
is old as Nature ; the persons all have their sacred- 
ness. His imaginative life dresses all things in 
their best. His fears adorn the dark parts with 
poetry. He has heard of wild horses and of bad 
boys, and with a pleasing terror he watches at his 
gate for the passing of those varieties of each spe- 
cies. The first ride into the country, the first bath 
in running water, the first time the skates are put 
on, the first game out of doors in moonlight, the 
books of the nursery, are new chapters of joy. The 
" Arabian Nights' Entertainments," the " Seven 
Champions of Christendom," "Robinson Crusoe," 
and the " Pilgrim's Progress," — what mines of 
thought and emotion, what a wardrobe to dress the 
whole world withal, are in this encyclopaedia of 
young thinking ! And so by beautiful traits, which 
without art yet seem the masterpiece of wisdom, 
provoking the love that watches and educates him, 
the little pilgrim prosecutes the journey through 
nature which he has thus gaily begun. He grows 
up the ornament and joy of the house, which rings 
to his glee, to rosy boyhood. 

"^-The household is the home of the man, as well 
as of the child. The events that occur therein are 
more near and affecting to us than those which 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 105 

are sought in senates and academies/ Domestic 
events are certainly our affair. What are called 
public events may or may not be ours. If a man 
wishes to acquaint himself with the real history of 
the world, with the spirit of the age, he must not 
go first to the state-house or the court-room* The 
X subtle spirit of life must be sought in facts nearer. 
Mt is what is done and suffered in the house, in the 
constitution, in the temperament, in the personal 
history, that has the profoundest interest for us. 
Fact is better than fiction, if only we could get pure 
fact. Do you think any rhetoric or any romance 
would get your ear from the wise gypsy who could 
tell straight on the real fortunes of the man ; who 
could reconcile your moral character and your nat- 
ural history ; who could explain your misfortunes, 
your fevers, your debts, your temperament, your 
habits of thought, your tastes, and, in every expla- 
nation, not sever you from the whole, but unite you 
to it ? Is it not plain that not in senates, or courts, 
or chambers of commerce, but in the dwelling-house 
must the true character and hope of the time be 
consulted ? These facts are, to be sure, harder to 
read. It is easier to count the census, or compute 
the square extent of a territory, to criticise its pol- 
ity, books, art, than to come to the persons and 
dwellings of men and read their character and 
hope in their way of life. Yet we are always hov- 



106 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

ering round this better divination. In one form or 
another we are always returning to it. The physi- 
ognomy and phrenology of to-day are rash and me- 
chanical systems enough, but they rest on everlast- 
ing foundations. We are sure that the sacred form 
of man is not seen in these whimsical, pitiful, and I 
sinister masks (masks which we wear and which i 
we meet), these bloated and shrivelled bodies, bald ^ 
heads, bead eyes, short winds, puny and precarious 
healths, and early deaths. We live ruins amidst 
ruins. The great facts are the near ones. The 
account of the body is to be sought in the mind. 
The history of your fortunes is written first in your 
life. 

Let us come then out of the public square and 
enter the domestic precinct. Let us go to the sit- 
ting-room, the table-talk and the expenditure of our 
contemporaries. An increased consciousness of the 
soul, you say, characterizes the period. Let us see 
if it has not only arranged the atoms at the circum- 
ference, but the atoms at the core. Does the house- 
hold obey an idea ? Do you see the man, — Ms 
form, genius, and aspiration, — in his economy? Is 
that translucent, thorough-lighted ? There should 
be nothing confounding and conventional in econ- 
omy, but the genius and love of the man so conspic- 
uously marked in all his estate that the eye that 
knew him should read his character in his property, 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 107 

in Ills grounds, in his ornaments, in every expense. 
A man's money sliould not follow the direction of 
his neighbor's money, but should represent to him 
the things he would willingliest do with it. I am 
not one thing and my expenditure another. My 
expenditure is me. That our expenditure and our 
character are twain, is the vice of society. 

We ask the price of many things in shops and 
stalls, but some things each man buys without hes- 
itation ; if it were only letters at the post-office, con- 
veyance in carriages and boats, tools for his work, 

^ books that are written to his condition, etc. Let 
him never buy anything else than what he wants, 

^ never subscribe at others' instance, never give un- 

j willingly. Thus, a scholar is a literary foundation. 
All his expense is for Aristotle, Fabricius, Eras- 
mus, and Petrarch. Do not ask him to help with 
his savings young drapers or grocers to stock their 
shops, or eager agents to lobby in legislatures, or 
join a company to build a factory or a fishing-craft. 

— -These things are also to be done, but not by such 
as he. How could such a book as Plato's Dia- 
logues have come down, but for the sacred savings 
of scholars and their fantastic appropriation of 
them ? 

Another man is a mechanical genius, an inventor 
of looms, a builder of ships, — a ship-building foun- 
dation, and could achieve nothing if he should dissi- 



108 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

I pate himself on books or on horses. Another is a 
farmer, an agricultural foundation ; another is a 
chemist, and the same rule holds for all. We 
must not make believe with our money, but spend 

\ heartily, and buy tip and not doicn. 

I am afraid that, so considered, our houses will 
not be found to have unity and to express the best 
thought. The household, the calling, the friend- 
ships, of the citizen are not homogeneous. His 
house ought to show us his honest opinion of what 
makes his well-being when he rests among his kin- 
dred, and forgets all affectation, compliance, and 
even exertion of will. He brings home whatever 
commodities and ornaments have for years allured 
his pursuit, and his character must be seen in them. 
But what idea predominates in our houses ? Thrift 
first, then convenience and pleasure. Take off all 
the roofs, from street to street, and we shall seldom 
find the temple of any higher god than Prudence. 
The progress of domestic living has been in clean- 
liness, in ventilation, in health, in decorum, in 
countless means and arts of comfort, in the concen- 
tration of all the utilities of every clime in each 
house. They are arranged for low benefits. The 

I houses of the rich are confectioners' shops, where we 

j get sweetmeats and wine ; the houses of the poor 
are imitations of these to the extent of their ability. 
With these ends housekeeping is not beautiful ; it 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 109 

cheers and raises neither the husband, the wife, nor 
the child ; neither the host nor the guest ; it op- 
presses women. A house kept to the end of pru- 
dence is laborious without joy ; a house kept to the 
end of display is impossible to all but a few women, 
and^eir success is dearly bought. 
/"If we look at this matter curiously, it becomes 
/ dangerous. We need all the force of an idea to lift 
/ this load, for the wealth and multiplication of con- 
V^veniences embarrass us, especially in northern cli- 
mates. The shortest enumeration of our wants in 
this rugged climate appalls us by the multitude of 
things not easy to be done. And if you look at 
the multitude of particulars, one would say : Good 
housekeeping is impossible : order is too precious a 
thing to dwell with men and women. See, in fami- 
lies where there is both substance and taste, at wha 
expense any favorite punctuality is maintained. If 
the children, for example, are considered, dressed, 
dieted, attended, kept in proper company, schooled, 
and at home fostered by the parents, — then does 
the hospitality of the house suffer; friends are less 
carefully bestowed, the daily table less catered. If 
the hours of meals are punctual, the apartments are 
slovenly. If the linens and hangings are clean and 
fine and the furniture good, the yard, the garden, 
the fences are neglected. If all are well attended, 
then must the master and mistress be studious of 



110 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

particulars at the cost of tlieir own accomplisl^, 
ments and^growth ; or persons are treated as 
things. 

The difficulties to be overcome must be freely 
admitted ; they are many and great. Nor are they 
to be disposed of by any criticism or amendment of 
particulars taken one at a time, but only by the 
arrangement of the household to a higher end than 
those to which our dwellings are usually built and 
furnished. And is there any calamity more grave, 
or that more invokes the best good-will to remove 
it, than this ? — to go from chamber to chamber 
and see no beauty ; to find in the housemates no 
aim ; to hear an endless chatter and blast ; to be 
compelled to criticise ; to hear only to dissent and to 
be disgusted ; to find no invitation to what is good 
in us, and no receptacle for what is wise : — this 
is a great price to pay for sweet bread and warm 
lodging, — being defrauded of affinity, of repose, 
of genial culture, and the inmost presence of 
beauty. 

It is a sufficient accusation of our ways of living, 
and certainly ought to open our ear to every good- 
minded reformer, that our idea of domestic well- 
being now needs wealth to execute it. Give me the 
means, says the wife, and your house shall not an- 
noy your taste nor waste your time. On hearing 
this we understand how these iMeans have come to 



DOMESTIC LIFE. Ill 

be so omnipotent on earth. And indeed tlie love of 
wealth seems to grow chiefly out of the root of the 
love of the Beautiful. The desire of gold is not for 
gold. It is not the love of much wheat and wool 
and household-stuff. It is the means of freedom 
and benefit. We scorn shifts ; we desire the ele- 
gance of munificence ; we desire at least to put no 
stint or limit on our parents, relatives, guests or de- 
pendents ; we desire to play the benefactor and the 
prince with our townsmen, with the stranger at the 
gate, with the bard or the beauty, with the man or 
woman of worth who alights at our . door. How\ 
can we do this, if the wants of each day imprison I 
us in lucrative labors, and constrain us to a contin-/ 
ual vigilance lest we be betrayed into expense ? ^ 
Give us wealth, and the home shall exist. But 
that is a very imperfect and inglorious solution of 
the problem, and therefore no solution. " Give us 
tvealthJ^ You ask too much. Few have wealth, 
but all must have a home. Men are not born rich ; 
and in getting wealth the man is generally sacri- 
ficed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring . 
wealth at last. Besides, that cannot be the right 
answer ; — there are objections to wealth. Wealth 
is a shift. The wise man angles with himself only, 
and with no meaner bait. Our whole use of wealth 
needs revision and reform. Generosity does not 
consist in giving money or money's worth. These 



112 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

so-called goods are only the shadow of good. To 
give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is 
only a postponement of the real pa5maent, a bribe 
paid for silence, a credit-system in which a paper 
promise to pay answers for the time instead of liqui- 

^ dation. We owe to man higher succors than food 
and fire, ^e owe to man man^ If he is sick, is 
unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because 
there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully 
withholden from him. He should be visited^in this 
his prison with rebuke to the evil demons, with 
manly encouragement, with no mean-spirited offer 
of condolence because you have not money, or mean 
offer of money as the utmost benefit, but by your 
heroism, your purity, and your faith. You are to 
bring with you that spirit which is understanding, 

/ health and self-help. To offer him money in lieu 
of these is to do him the same wrong as when the 
bridegroom offers his betrothed virgin a sum of 

/ money to release him from his engagements. The 

\, great depend on their heart, not on their purse. 
7 Genius and virtue, like diamonds, are best plain- 

{ set, — set in lead, set in poverty. The greatest man 
> in history was the poorest. How was it with the 
^-captains and sages of Greece and Rome, with Soc- 
rates, with Epaminondas? Aristides was made 
general receiver of Greece, to collect the tribute 
which each state was to furnish aecainst the barba- 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 113 

rian. " Poor, " says Plutarch, " when he set about 
it, poorer when he had finished it." How was it 
with ^milius and Cato ? What kind of a house 
was kept by Paul and John, by Milton and Mar- 
vell, by Samuel Johnson, by Samuel Adams in 
Boston, and Jean Paul Richter at Baireuth ? 

I think it plain that this voice of communities 
and ages, ' Give us wealth, and the good household 
shall exist,' is vicious, and leaves the whole diffi- 
culty untouched. It is better, certainly, in this 
form, ' Give us your labor, and the household be- 
gins.' I see not how serious labor, the labor of all 
and every day, is to be avoided ; and many things 
betoken a revolution of opinion and practice in 
regard to manual labor that may go far to aid our 
practical inquiry. Another age may divide the 
manual labor of the world more equally onfall the 
memb ers of ^society, and so make the labors of a 
few hours avail to the wants and add to the vigor 
of the man. But the reform that applies itseK to 
the household must not be partial. It must correct 
the whole system of our social living. It must come 
with plain living and high thinking ; it must break 
up caste, and put domestic service on another foun- 
dation. It must come in connection with a true 
acceptance by each man of his vocation, — not 
chosen by his parents or friends, but by his genius, 
with earnestness and love. 

VOL. VII. 8 



114 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

. Nor is this redress so hopeless as it seems. Cer- 
/tainly, if we begin by reforming particulars of our 
[ present system, correcting a few evils and letting 
1 the rest stand, we shall soon give up in despair. 
I For our social forms are very far from truth and 
! equity. But the way to set the axe at the root of 
\ the tree is to raise our aim. Let us understand 
then that a house should bear witness in all its 
economy that human culture is the end to which it 
is built and garnished. It stands there under the 
sun and moon to ends analogous, and not less noble 
than theirs. It is not for festivity, it is not for 
sleep : but the pine and the oak shall gladly descend 
from the mountains to uphold the roof of men 
as faithful and necessary as themselves ; to be the 
shelter always open to good and true persons ; — a 
hall which shines with sincerity, brows ever tran- 
quil, and a demeanor impossible to disconcert ; 
whose inmates know what they want ; who do not 
ask your house how theirs should be kept. They 
have aims ; they cannot pause for trifles. The diet 
of the house does not create its order, but knowl- 
edge, character, action, absorb so much life and 
yield so much entertainment that the refectory has 
ceased to be so curiously studied. With a change 
of aim has followed a change of the whole scale by 
which men and things were wont to be measured. 
Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 115 

j/lt begins to be seen that tlie poor are only theyX 
\j who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor.y 
/ The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the 
very rich, — in a true scale would be found very 
indigent and ragged. The great make us feel, 
first of all, the indifference o f circumstances. They 
call into activity the higher perceptions and sub- 
I due the low habits of comfort and luxury ; but the 
I higher perceptions find their objects everywhere ; 
i only the low habits need palaces and banquets. 

Let a man, then, say, My house is here in the 
county, for the culture of the county ; — an eating- 
house and sleeping-house for travellers it shall be 
but it shall be much more. I pray you, O excel- \ 
lent wife, not to cmnber yourself and me to get a \ 
rich dinner for this man or this woman who has j 
alighted at our gate, nor a bedchamber made ready i 
at too great a cost. These things, if they are curi- ' 
ous in them, they can get for a dollar at any vil- 
lage. But let this stranger, if he will, in your 
looks, in your accent and behavior, read your heart 
and earnestness, your thought and will, which he 
cannot buy at any price, in any village or city ; 
and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine | 
sparely and sleep hard in order to behold. Cer- ' 
tainly, let the board be spread and let the bed be 
dressed for the traveller v but let not the ^emphasis / 
of hospitality lie in these things;, Honor to the 



116 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

house where they are simple to the verge of hard- 
ship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads 
the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth 
and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds. 

There was never a country in the world which 
could so easily exhibit this heroism as ours ; never 
any where the State has made such efficient provis- 
ion for popular education, where intellectual enter- 
tainment is so within reach of youthful ambition. 
The poor man's son is educated. There is many a 
humble house in every city, in every town, where 
talent and taste and sometimes genius dwell with 
poverty and labor. Who has not seen, and who can 
see unmoved, under a low roof, the eager, blushing 
boys discharging as they can their household chores, 
and hastening into the sitting-room to the study of 
to-morrow's merciless lesson, yet stealing time to 
read one chapter more of the novel hardly smuggled 
into the tolerance of father and mother, — atoning 
for the same by some pages of Plutarch or Gold- 
smith ; the warm sympathy with which they kindle 
each other in school-yard or in barn or wood-shed 
with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the 

• last oration, or mimicry of the orator ; the youthful 
criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons ; the school 
', declamation faithfully rehearsed at home, some- 
times to the fatigue, sometimes to the admiration 

^of sisters; the first solitary joys of literary vanity, 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 117 

when the translation or the theme has been com- 
pleted, sitting alone near the top of the house ; the 
cautious comparison of the attractive advertisement 
of the arrival of Macready, Booth, or Kemble, or 
of the discourse of a well-known speaker, with the 
expense of the entertainment ; the affectionate de- 
light with which they greet the return of each one 
after the early separations which school or business 
require ; the foresight with which, during such 
absences, they hive the honey which opportunity 
offers, for the ear and imagination of the others ; 
and the unrestrained glee with which they disbur- 
den themselves of their early mental treasures when 
the holidays bring them again together ? What is 
the hoop that holds them stanch ? It is the iron 
band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which, 
excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which 
make other boys too_.fia^l^old^ has directed their 
activity in safe and right channels, and made them, 
despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beau- 
tiful, and the good. Ah ! short-sighted students 
of books, of Nature, and of man ! too happy, could 
they know their advantages. They pine for free- 
dom from that mild parental yoke ; they sigh for 
fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre, and prema- 
ture freedom and dissipation, which others possess. 
Woe to them if their wishes were crowned ! The 
angels that dwell with them and are weaving lau- 



118 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

rels of life for their youthful brows, are Toil and 
Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith.') 

In many parts of true economy a cheering lesson 
may be learned from the mode of life and manners 
of the later Romans, as described to us in the letters 
of the younger Pliny. Nor can I resist the temp- 
tation of quoting so trite an instance as the noble 
housekeeping of Lord Falkland in Clarendon : " His 
house beino; within little more than ten miles from 
Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship 
with the most polite and accurate men of that Uni- 
versity, who found such an immenseness of wit and 
such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a 
fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such 
a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in any- 
thing, yet such an excessive humility, as if he had 
known nothing, that they frequently resorted and 
dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer 
air; so that his house was a university in a less 
volume, whither they came, not so much for repose 
as study, and to examine and refine those grosser 
propositions which laziness and consent made cur- 
rent in vulgar conversation." 

I honor that man whose ambition it is, not to win 
laurels in the state or the army, not to be a jurist 
or a naturalist, not to be a poet or a commander, 
but to be a master of living well, and to administer 
the offices of master or servant, of husband, father, 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 119 

and friend. But it requires as much breadth of 
power for this as for those other functions, — as 
much, or more, — and the reason for the failure is 
the same. I think the vice of our housekeeping is 
that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of gov- 
ernment, the vice of education, the vice of religion, 
is one with that of private life. ^ 

In the old fables we used tp read of a cloak 
brought from fairy-land. as- tTgifif for the fairest and 
purest in Prince Al^roir'^'court.^ It was to be her 
prize whom it would fit. Every (me was eager to 
try it on, but it wtuld fit. nobody : for one it was 
a world too wide, for the next it, dragged on the 
ground, and for the third it shrunk i§-. a scarf. 
They, of course, said that the devil was4ri the man- 
tle, for really the truth was in the maiitle, and was 
exposing the ugliness Vhich each would fain con- 
ceal. All drew back with terror from the gar^ient. 
The innocent Genelas alone could wear it. ,>In like 
manner, every man is prodded in liistliought with 
a measure of man which h^pplies to every passen- 
ger. Unhappily, not one in many thousands comes 
up to the stature and proportions of the model. 
Neither does the measurer himself, neither do the 
people in the street ; neither do the select individ- 
uals whom he admires, — the heroes of the race. 
When he inspects them critically, he discovers that 
their aims are low, that they are too quickly satis- 



120 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

fied. He observes the swiftness with which life 
culminates, and the humility of the expectations of 
the greatest part of men. To each occurs, soon after 
the age of puberty, some event or society or way 
of living, which becomes the crisis of life and the 
chief fact in their history. In woman, it is love and 
marriage (which is more reasonable) ; and yet it is 
pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel 
of an unfolding life from such a youthful and gen- 
erally inconsiderate period as the age of courtship 
and marriage. In men, it is their place of educa- 
tion, choice of an emplojrment, settlement in a town, 
or removal to the East or to the West, or some 
other(magnified trifle.) which makes the meridian 
moment, and all the after years and actions only 
derive interest from their relation to that. Hence 
it comes that we soon catch the trick of each man's 
conversation, and knowing his two or three main 
facts, anticipate what he thinks of each new topic 
that rises. It is scarcely less perceivable in edu- 
cated men, so called, than in the uneducated. I 
have seen finely endowed men at college festivals, 
ten, twenty years after they had left the halls, re- 
turning, as it seemed, the same boj^s who went 
away. The same jokes pleased, the same straws 
tickled ; the manhood and offices they brought 
thither at this return seemed mere ornamental 
masks ; underneath they were boys yet. We never 



DOMESTIC LIFE, 121 

come to be^itizens of_tlie wo]^^ but are still villa- 
gers, who think that every thing in their petty town 
is a little superior to the same thing anywhere else. 
In each the circumstance . signalized differs, but in 
each it is made the coals of an ever-burning ego^ 
tism. In one, it was his going to sea ; in a second, 
the difficulties he combated in going to college ; in 
a third, his journey to the West, or his voyage to 
Canton ; in a fourth, his coming out of the Quaker 
Society ; in a fifth, his new diet and regimen ; in a 
sixth, his coming forth from the abolition organiza- 
tions ; and in a seventh, his going into them. It 
is a life of toys and trinkets. We are too easily 
pleased. 

I think this sad result appears in the manners. 
The men we see in each other do not give us the 
image and likeness of man. The men we see 
are whipped through the world ; they are harried, 
wrinkled, anxious ; they all seem the hacks of some 
invisible riders. How seldom do we behold tran- 

Vquillity ! We have never yet seen a man. We do 
not know the majestic manners that belong to him, 
which appease and exalt the beholder. There are 
no divine persons with us, and the multitude do not 
hasten to be divine. And yet we hold fast, all 
our lives long, a faith in a better life, in better 
men, in clean and noble relations, notwithstanding 
our total inexperience of a true society. Certainly 



122 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

A 

this was not tlie intention of nature, to produce, 
with all this immense expenditure of means and 
power, so cheap and humble a result. The aspira- 
tions in the heart after the good and true teach us 
better, — nay, the men themselves suggest a better 
life. 

Every individual nature has its own beauty. 
One is struck in every company, at every fireside, 
with the riches of nature, when he hears so many 
new tones, all musical, sees in each person original 
manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, 
and reads new expressions of face. He perceives 
that nature has laid for each the foundations of 
a divine building, if the soul will build thereon. 
There is no face, no form, which one cannot in 
fancy associate with great power of intellect or 
with generosity of soul. In our experience, to be 
sure, beauty is not, as it ought to be, the dower 
of man and of woman as invariably as sensation. 
Beauty is, even in the beautiful, occasional, — or, 
as one has said, culminating and perfect only a 
single moment, before which it is unripe, and after 
which it is on the wane. But beauty is never quite 
absent from our eyes. Every face, every figure, 
suggests its own right and sound estate. Our 
friends are not their own highest form. But let 
the hearts they have agitated witness what power 
has lurked in the traits of these structures of clay 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 123 

that pass and repass us ! The secret power of form 
over the imagination and affections transcends all 
our philosophy. The first glance we meet may sat- 
isfy us that matter is the vehicle of higher powers 
than its own, and that no laws of line or surface 
can ever account for the inexhaustible expressive- 
ness of form. We see heads that turn on the pivot 
of the spine, — no more ; and we see heads that , 
seem to turn on a pivot as deep as the axle of the 
world, — so slow, and lazily, and great, they move. 
We see on the lip of our companion the presence 
or absence of the great masters of thought and 
poetry to his mind. We read in his brow, on meet- 
ing him after many years, that he is where we left 
him, or that he has made great strides. 

Whilst thus nature and the hints we draw from 
man suggest a true and lofty life, a household equal 
to the beauty and grandeur of this world, especially 
we learn the same lesson from those best relations 
to individual men which the heart is always prompt- 
ing us to form. Happy will that house be in which 
the relations are formed from character ; after the 
highest, and not after the lowest order ; the house 
in which character marries, and not confusion and 
a miscellany of unavowable motives. Then shall 
marriage be a covenant to secure to either party 
the sweetness and honor of being a calm, continu- 
ing, inevitable benefactor to the other. Yes, and 



124 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

the sufficient reply to the sceptic who doubts the 
competence of man to elevate and to be elevated is 
in that desire and power to stand in joyful and en- 
nobling intercourse with individuals, which makes 
the faith and the practice of all reasonable men. 

'he ornament of a house is the friends who fre- 
quent it. There is no event greater in life than the 
appearance of new persons about our hearth, except 
it be the progress of the character which draws 
them. It has been finely added by Landor to his 
definition of the great man, " It is he who can call 
together the most select company when it pleases 
him." A verse of the old Greek Menander re- 
mains, which runs in translation : — 

" Not on the store of sprightly wine, 

Nor plenty of delicious meats, 
Though generous Nature did design 

To court us with perpetual treats, — 
'T is not on these we for content depend, 

So much as on the shadow of a Friend." 

It is the happiness which, where it is truly 
known, postpones all other satisfactions, and makes 
politics and commerce and churches cheap. For 
we figure to ourselves, — do we not ? — that when 
men shall meet as they should, as states meet, — 
each a benefactor, a shower of falling stars, so rich 
with deeds, with thoughts, with so much accomplish- 
ment, — it shall be the festival of nature, which all 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 125 

things symbolize ; and perhaps Love is only the 
highest symbol of Friendship, as all other things 
seem symbols of love. In the progress of each 
man's character, his relations to the best men, which 
at first seem only the romances of youth, acquire a 
graver imj)ortance ; and he will have learned the 
lesson of life who is skilful in the ethics of friend- 
ship. 

Beyond its primary ends of the conjugal, paren- 
tal, and amicable relations, the household should 
cherish the beautiful arts and the sentiment of ven- 
eration. 

1. Whatever brings the dweller into a finer life, 
what educates his eye, or ear, or hand, whatever 
purifies and enlarges him, may well fuid place there. 
And yet let him not think that a property in beauti- 
ful objects is necessary to his apprehension of them, 
and seek to turn his house into a museum. Rather 
let the noble practice of the Greeks find place in 
our society, and let the creations of the plastic arts 
be collected with care in galleries by the piety and 
taste of the people, and yielded as freely as the sun- 
light to all. Meantime, be it remembered, we are 
artists ourselves, and competitors, each one, with 
Phidias and Raphael in the production of what is 
graceful or grand. (The fountain of beauty is the 
heart, and every generous thought illustrates the 



126 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

/ walls of your cliamber. Why should we owe our 
^ power of attracting our friends to pictures and 
vases, to cameos and architecture? Why should 
we convert ourselves into showmen and appendages \ 
to our fine houses and our works of art? If by \ 
love and nobleness we take up into ourselves the I 
beauty we admire, we shall spend it again on aU/ 
around us. The man, the woman, needs not the 
embellishment of canvas and marble, whose every 
act is a subject for the sculptor, and to whose eye 
the gods and nymphs never appear ancient, for they 
know by heart the whole instinct of majesty. 

I do not undervalue the fine instruction which 
statues and pictures give. But I think the public 
museum in each town will one day relieve the 
private house of this charge of owning and exhibit- 
ing them. I go to Rome and see on the walls of 
the Vatican the Transfiguration, painted by Ra- 
phael, reckoned the first picture in the world ; or 
in the Sistine Chapel I see the grand sibyls and 
prophets, painted in fresco by Michel Angelo, — 
which have every day now for three hundred years 
inflamed the imagination and exalted the piety of 
what vast multitudes of men of all nations ! I wish 
to bring home to my children and my friends copies 
of these admirable forms, which I can find in the 
shops of the engravers ; but I do not wish the vex- 
ation of owning them. I wish to find in my own 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 127 

town a library and museum wHch is tlie property 
of the town, where I can deposit this precious treas- 
ure, where I and my children can see it from time 
to time, and where it has its proper place among 
hundreds of such donations from other citizens who 
have brought thither whatever articles they have 
judged to be in their nature rather a public than a 
private property. 

A collection of this kind, the property of each 
town, would dignify the town, and we should love 
and respect our neighbors more. Obviously, it 
would be easy for every town to discharge this 
truly municipal duty. Every one of us would 
gladly contribute his share ; and the more gladly, 
the more considerable the institution had become. 

2. Certainly, not aloof from this homage to 
beauty, but in strict connection therewith, the house 
will come to be esteemed a Sanctuary. The lan- 
guage of a ruder age has given to common law the 
maxim that every man's house is his castle : the 
progress of truth will make every house a shrine. 
Will not man one day open his eyes and see how 
dear he is to the soul of Nature, — how near it is 
to him ? Will he not see, through all he miscalls 
accident, that Law prevails for ever and ever ; that 
his private being is a part of it ; that its home is 
in his own unsounded heart ; that his economy, his 



128 DOMESTIC LIFE. 

labor, his good and bad fortune, bis health and 
manners are all a curious and exact demonstration in 
miniature of the Genius of the Eternal Providence ? 
When he perceives the Law, he ceases to despond. 
Whilst he sees it, every thought and act is raised, 
and becomes an act of religion. Does the consecra- 
( tion of Sunday confess the desecration of the entire 
week? Does the consecration of the church con- 
fess the profanation of the house? Let us 'read 
the incantation backward. Let the man stand on 
his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional ; and 
the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the 
universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the 
Household. 

These are the consolations, — these are the ends 
to which the household is instituted and the rooftree 
stands. If these are sought and in any good degree 
attained, can the State, can commerce, can climate, 
can the labor of many for one, yield anything better, 
or half as good? Beside these aims. Society is 
weak and the State an intrusion. I think that the 
heroism which at this day would make on us the 
impression of Epaminondas and Phocion must be 
that of a domestic conqueror. He who shall bravely 
and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention 
and Fashion, and show men how to lead a clean, 
handsome, and heroic life amid the beggarly ele- 
ments of our cities and villages ; whoso shall teach 



DOMESTIC LIFE. 129 

me liow to eat my meat and take my repose and 
deal with men, without any shame following, will 
restore the life of man to splendor, and make his 
own name dear to all history. 

VOL. VII. 9 



FAKMING. 



FAKMING. 



The glory of the farmer is that, in the division 
of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at 
last on his primitive activity. He stands* close to 
nature ; he obtains from the earth the bread and 
the meat. The food which was not, he causes to 
be. The first farmer was the first man, and all his- 
toric nobility rests on possession and use of land. 
Men do not like hard work, but every man has an 
exceptional respect for tillage, and a feeling that 
this is the original calling of his race, that he him- 
self is only excused from it by some circumstance 
which made him delegate it for a time to other 
hands. If he have not some skill which recom- 
mends him to the farmer, some product for which 
the farmer will give him corn, he must himseK re- 
turn into his due place among the planters. And 
the profession has in all eyes its ancient charm, as 
standing nearest to God, the first cause. 

Then the beauty of nature, the tranquillity and 
innocence of the countryman, his independence, and 
his pleasing arts, — the care of bees, of poultry, of 



134 FARMING. 

sheep, of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruits, 
of orchards and forests, and the reaction of these on 
the workman, in giving him a strength and plain 
dignity like the face and manners of nature, — all 
men acknowledge. All men keep the farm in 
reserve as an asylum where, in case of mischance, 
to hide their poverty, — or a solitude, if they do 
not succeed in society. And who knows how many 
glances of remorse are turned this way from the 
bankrupts of trade, from mortified pleaders in 
courts and senates, or from the victims of idleness 
and pleasure ? Poisoned by town life and town 
vices, the sufferer resolves ; ' Well, my children, 
whom I have injured, shall go back to the land, to 
be recruited and cured by that which should have 
been my nursery, and now shall be their hospital.' ^ 
T" The farmer's office is precise and important, but 
you must not try to paint him in rose-color ; you 
cannot make pretty compliments to fate and gravi- 
tation, whose minister he is. He represents the 
necessities. It is the beauty of the great economy 
of the world that makes his comeliness. He bends 
to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils 
and crops, as the sails of k ship bend to the wind. 
He represents continuous hard labor, year in, year 
out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed 
to nature, and not to city watches. He takes the 
pace of seasons, plants, and chemistry. Nature 



FARMING. 135 

never hurries : atom by atom, little by little, she 
achieves her work. The lesson one learns in fish- 
ing, yachting, hunting, or planting, is the manners 
of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and 
sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or 
lack of water, — patience with the slowness of our 
feet, with the parsimony of our strength, with the 
largeness of sea and land we must traverse, etc. 
The farmer times himself to Nature, and acquires 
that livelong patience which belongs to her. Slow, 
narrow man, his rule is that the earth shall feed 
and clothe him ; and he must wait for his crop to 
grow. His entertainments, his liberties and his 
spending must be on a farmer's scale, and not on a 
merchant's. It were as false for farmers to use a 
wholesale and massy expense, as for states to use a 
minute economy. But if thus pinched on one side, 
he has compensatory advantages. He is permanent, 
clings to his land as the rocks do. In the town 
where I live, farms remain in the same families for 
seven and eight generations ; and most of the 
first settlers (in 1635), should they reappear on 
the farms to-day, would find their own blood and 
names still in possession. And the like fact holds 
in the surrounding towns. 

This hard work will always be done by one kind 
of man ; not by scheming speculators, nor by sol- 
diers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson ; but 



136 FARMING. 

by men of endurance — deep-cliested, long-winded, 
tough, slow and sure, and timely. The farmer has 
a great health, and the appetite of health, and 
means to his end ; he has broad lands for his home, 
wood to burn great fires, plenty of plain food ; his 
milk at least is unwatered ; and for sleep, he has 
cheaper and better and more of it than citizens. 

He has grave trusts confided to him. In the 

great household of Nature, the farmer stands at 

the door of the bread-room, and weighs to each 

his loaf. It is for him to say whether men shall 

marry or not. Early marriages and the number 

of births are indissolubly connected with abundance 

of food ; or, as Burke said, " Man breeds at the 

mouth." Then he is the Board of Quarantine. 

The farmer is a hoarded capital of health, as the 

farm is the capital of wealth ; and it is from him 

that the health and power, moral and intellectual, 

of the cities came. The city is always recruited 

( from the country. The men in cities who are the"! 

\ centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, pol- 

\ itics, or practical arts, and the women of beauty 

] and genius, are the children or grandchildren of 

) farmers, and are spending the energies which their' , 

j fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty fur- | 

>^rows, in poverty, necessity, and darkness. ^ 

He is the continuous benefactor. He who digs 

a well, constructs a stone foimtain, plants a grove 



FARMING. 137 

of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard, builds 
a durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as 
puts a stone seat by the wayside, makes the land 
so far lovely and desirable, makes a fortune which 
he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful 
to his country long afterwards. The man that 
works at home helps society at large with some- 
what more of certainty than he who devotes him- 
self to charities. If it be true that, not by votes 
of political parties but by the eternal laws of polit- 
ical economy, slaves are driven out of a slave State 
as fast as it is surrounded by free States, then the 
true abolitionist is the farmer, who, heedless of 
laws and constitutions, stands all day in the field, 
investing his labor in the land, and making a prod- 
uct with which no forced labor can compete. 

We commonly say that the rich man can speak 
the truth, can afford honesty, can afford indepen- 
dence of opinion and action ; — and that is the the- 
ory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true 
sense, that is to say, not the man of large income 
and large expenditure, but solely the man whose 
outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so. 

In English factories, the boy that watches the 
loom, to tie the thread when the wheel stops to in- 
dicate that a thread is broken, is called a minder. 
And in this great factory of our Coi^ernican globe, 
shifting its slides, rotating its constellations, times. 



138 FARMING. 

and tides, bringing now the day of planting, then 
of watering, then of weeding, then of reaping, then 
of curing and storing, — the farmer is the minder. 
His machine is of colossal proportions ; the diam- 
eter of the water-wheel, the arms of the levers, the 
power of the battery, are out of all mechanic meas- 
ure ; and it takes him long to understand its parts 
and its working. This pump never " sucks ;" these 
screws are never loose; this machine is never out of 
gear ; the vat and piston, wheels and tires, never 
wear out, but are self -repairing. 

Who are the farmer's servants ? Not the Irish, 
nor the coolies, but Geology and Chemistry, the 
quarry of the air, the water of the brook, the light- 
ning of the cloud, the castings of the worm, the 
plough of the frost. Long before he was born, the 
sun of ages decomposed the rocks, mellowed his 
land, soaked it with light and heat, covered it with 
vegetable film, then with forests, and accumulated 
the sphagnum whose decays made the peat of his 
meadow. 

Science has shown the great circles in which 
nature works ; the manner in which marine plants 
balance the marine animals, as the land plants sup- 
ply the oxygen which the animals consume, and 
the animals the carbon which the plants absorb. 
These activities are incessant. Nature works on 
a method of all for each and each for alL The 



FARMING. 139 

strain that is made on one point bears on every 
arch and foundation of the structure. There is a 
perfect solidarity. You cannot detach an atom 
from its holdings, or strip off from it the electric- 
ity, gravitation, chemic affinity, or the* relation to 
light and heat, and leave the atom bare. No, it 
brings with it itso universal ties. 

Nature, like a cautious testator, ties up her estate 
so as not to bestow it all on one generation, but has 
a forelooking tenderness and equal regard to the 
next and the next, and the fourth and the fortieth 
age. There lie the inexhaustible magazines. The 
eternal rocks, as we call them, have held their oxy- 
gen or lime undiminished, entire, as it was. No 
particle of oxygen can rust or wear, but has the 
same energy as on the first morning. The good 
rocks, those patient waiters, say to him : ' We have 
the sacred power as we received it. We have not 
failed of our trust, and now, — when in our im- 
mense day the hour is at last struck — take the gas 
we have hoarded, mingle it with water, and let it 
be free to grow in plants and animals and obey the 
thought of man.' 

The earth works for him ; the earth is a machine 
which yields almost gratuitous service to every ap- 
plication of intellect. Every plant is a manufac- 
turer of soil. In the stomach of the plant develop- 
ment begins. The tree can draw on the whole air, 



140 FARMING. 

the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant 
is all suction-j^ipe, — imbibing from the ground by- 
its root, from the air by its leaves, with all its 
might. 

The air works for him. The atmosphere, a sharp 
solvent, drinks the essence and sj)irit of every solid 
on the globe, — a menstruum which melts the 
mountains into it. = Air is matter subdued by heat. ) 
As the sea is the grand receptacle of all rivers, so ( 
the air is the receptacle from which all things / 
spring, and into which they all return. The invis- j 
ible and creeping air takes form and solid mass. \ 
Our senses are sceptics, and believe only the im- 
pression of the moment, and do not believe the 
chemical fact that these huge mountain-chains are 
made up of gases and rolling wind. But Nature is 
as subtle as she is strong. She turns her capital 
day by day ; deals never with dead, but ever with 
quick subjects. All things are flowing, even those 
that seem immovable. The adamant is always 
passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the mate- 
rials which they want from the air and the ground. 
They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their 
own bodies into the air and earth again. The an- 
imal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual con- 
sumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn 
and decompose, slower, but incessantly. It is al- 
most inevitable to push the generalization up into 



FARMING. 141 

higher parts of nature, rank over rank into sen- 
tient beings. Nations burn with internal fire of 
thought and affection, which wastes while it works. 
We shall find finer combustion and finer fuel. In- 
tellect is a fire : rash and pitiless it melts this won- 
derful bone-house which is called man. Genius 
even, as it is the greatest good, is the greatest harm. 
Whilst all thus burns, — the universe in a blaze 
kindled from the torch of the sun, — it needs a per- 
petual tempering, a phlegm, a sleep, atmospheres 
of azote, deluges of water, to check the fury of the 
conflagration ; a hoarding to check the spending, 
a centripetence equal to the centrifugence ; and 
this is invariably supplied. 

The railroad dirt-cars are good excavators, but 
there is no porter like Gravitation, who- will bring 
down any weights which man cannot carry, and 
if he wants aid, knows where to find his fellow 
laborers. Water works in masses, and sets its ir- 
resistible shoulder to your mills or your shij)s, or 
transports vast boulders of rock in its iceberg a 
thousand miles. But its far greater power depends 
/on its talent of becoming little, and entering the 
' smallest holes and pores. By this agency, carrying 
in solution elements needful to every plant, the 
vegetable world exists. 

But as I said, we must not paint the farmer in 
rose -color. Whilst these grand energies have 



142 FARMING. 

wrought for him and made his task possible, he 
is habitually engaged in small economies, and is 
taught thepower^that lurks in petty things. Great 
is the force of a few simple arrangements ; for in- 
stance, the powers of a fence. On the prairie you 
wander a hundred miles and hardly find a stick or 
a stone. At rare intervals a thin oak-opening has 
been spared, and every such section has been long 
occupied. But the farmer manages to procure wood 
from far, puts up a rail-fence, and at once the seeds 
sprout and the oaks rise. It was only browsing 
and fire which had kept them down. Plant fruit- 
trees by the roadside, and their fruit will never be 
allowed to ripen. Draw a pine fence about them, 
and for fifty years they mature for the owner their 
delicate fruit. There is a great deal of enchant- 
ment in a chestnut rail or picketed pine boards. 

Nature suggests every economical expedient 
somewhere on a great scale. Set out a pine-tree, 
and it dies in the first year, or lives a poor spindle. 
But Nature drops a pine-cone in Mariposa, and it 
lives fifteen centuries, grows three or four hundred 
feet high, and thirty in diameter, — grows in a 
grove of giants, like a colonnade of Thebes. Ask 
the tree how it was done. It did not grow on a 
ridge, but in a basin, where it found deep soil, cold 
enough and dry enough for the pine ; defended it- 
self from the sun by growing in groves, and from 



FARMING. 143 

the wind by the walls of the mountain. The roots 
that shot deepest, and the stems of happiest expos- 
ure, drew the nourishment from the rest, until the 
less thrifty perished and manured the soil for the 
stronger, and the mammoth Sequoias rose to their 
enormous proportions. The traveller who saw them 
remembered his orchard at home, where every year, 
in the destroying wind, his forlorn trees pined like 
suffering virtue. In September, when the pears 
hang heaviest and are taking from the sun their 
gay colors, comes usually a gusty day which shakes 
the w^hole garden and throws down the heaviest 
fruit in bruised heaps. The planter took the hint 
of the Sequoias, built a high wall, or — better — 
surrounded the orchard with a nursery of birches 
and evergreens. Thus he had the niountain basin 
in miniature ; and his pears grew »to the size of 
melons, and the vines beneath them ran an eighth 
of a mile. But this shelter creates a new climate. 
The wall that keeps off the strong wind keeps off 
the cold wind. The high wall reflecting the heat 
back on the soil gives that acre a quadruple share 
of sunshine, — 

" Enclosing in the garden square 
A dead and standing pool of air," 

and makes a little Cuba within it, whilst all with- 
out IS Labrador. 

The chemist comes to his aid every year by fol- 



144 FARMING. 

lowing out some new hint drawn from nature, and 
now affirms that this dreary space occupied by the 
farmer is needless ; he will concentrate his kitchen- 
garden into a box of one or two rods square, will 
take the roots into his laboratory; the vines and 
stalks and stems may go sprawling about in the 
fields outside, he will attend to the roots in his tub, 
gorge them with food that is good for them. The 
smaller his garden, the better he can feed it, and 
the larger the crop. As he nursed his Thanksgiv- 
ing turkeys on bread and milk, so he will pamper 
his peaches and grapes on the viands they like best. 
If they have an appetite for potash, or salt, or iron, 
or ground bones, or even now and then for a dead 
hog, he will indulge them. They keep the secret 
well, and never tell on your table whence they drew 
their sunset complexion or their delicate flavors. 

See what the farmer accomplishes by a cartload 
of tiles : he alters the climate by letting off water 
which kept the land cold through constant evapora- 
tion, and allows the warm rain to bring down into 
the roots the temperature of the air and of the sur- 
face-soil ; and he deepens the soil, "since the dis- 
charge of this standing water allows the roots of 
his plants to penetrate below the surface to the sub- 
soil, and accelerates the ripening of the crop. The 
town of Concord is one of the oldest towns in this 
country, far on now in its third century. The se- 



FARMING. 145 

lectmen have once in every five years f>erambulate(i 
the boundaries, and yet, in this very year, a large 
quantity of land has been discovered and added to 
the town without a murmur of complaint from any 
quarter. By drainage w^e went down to a subsoil 
we did not know, and have found there is a Con- 
cord under old Concord, which we are now getting 
the best crops from ; a Middlesex under Middle- 
sex ; and, in fine, that Massachusetts has a base- 
ment story more valuable and that promises to pay 
a better rent than all the superstructure. But these 
tiles have acquired by association a new interest. 
These tiles are political economists, confuters of 
Malthus and Ricardo ; they are so many Young 
Americans announcing a better era, — more bread. 
They drain the land, make it sw^eet and friable ; 
have made English Chat Moss a garden, and will 
now do as much for the Dismal Swamp. But be- 
yond this benefit they are the text of better opin- 
ions and better auguries for mankind. 

There has been a nightmare bred in England of 
indigestion and spleen among landlords and loom- 
lords, namely, the dogma that men breed too fast 
for the powers of the soil ; that men multiply in 
a geometrical ratio, whilst corn multiplies only in 
an arithmetical ; and hence that, the more prosper- 
ous we are, the faster we approach these frightful 
limits: nay, the plight of every new generation 

VOL. VU. 10 



146 FARMING. 

is worse than of the foregoing, because the first 
comers take up the best lands ; the next, the sec- 
ond best ; and each succeeding wave of population 
is driven to poorer, so that the land is ever yield- 
ing less returns to enlarging hosts of eaters. Henry- 
Carey of Philadelphia replied : " Not so, Mr. Mal- 
thus, but just the opposite of so is the fact." 

The first planter, the savage, without helpers, 
without tools, looking chiefly to safety from his 
enemy, — man or beast, — takes poor land. The 
better lands are loaded with timber, which he can- 
not clear ; they need drainage, which he cannot at- 
tempt. He cannot plough, or fell trees, or drain the 
rich swamp. He is a poor creature ; he scratches 
with a sharp stick, lives in a cave or a hutch, has 
no road but the trail of the moose or bear ; he 
lives on their flesh when he can kill one, on roots 
and fruits when he cannot. He falls, and is lame ; 
he coughs, he has a stitch in his side, he has a fever 
and chills; when he is hungry, he cannot always 
kill and eat a bear, — chances of war, — sometimes 
the bear eats him. 'T is long before he digs or 
plants at all, and then only a patch. Later he 
learns that his planting is better than hunting; 
that the earth works faster for him than he can 
work for himself, — works for him when he is 
asleep, when it rains, when heat overcomes him. 
The sunstroke which knocks him down brings his 



FARMING. 147 

com up. As Ms family thrive, and other planters 
come u]) around him, he begins to fell trees and 
clear good land; and when, by and by, there is 
more skill, and tools and roads, the new genera- 
tions are strong enough to open the lowlands, where 
the wash of mountains has accumulated the best 
soil, which yield a hundred-fold the former crops. 
The last lands are the best lands. It needs science 
and great numbers to cultivate the best lands, and 
in the best manner. Thus true political economy 
is not mean, but liberal, and on the pattern of the 
sun and sky. Population increases in the ratio of 
morality ; credit exists in the ratio of morality. 

Meantime we cannot enumerate the incidents 
and agents of the farm without reverting to their 
influence on the farmer. He carries out this cu- 
mulative preparation of means to their last effect. 
This crust of soil which ages have refined he re- 
fines again for the feeding of a civil and instructed 
people. The great elements with which he deals 
cannot leave him unaffected, or unconscious of his 
ministry; but their influence somewhat resembles 
that which the same Nature has on the child, — of 
subduing and silencing him. We see the farmer 
with pleasure and respect when we think what pow- 
ers and utilities are so meekly worn. He knows 
every secret of labor ; he changes the face of the 
landscape. Put him on a new planet and he would 



148 FARMING. 

know where to begin ; yet tliere is no arrogance in 
his bearing, but a perfect gentleness. The farmer 
stands well on the world. Plain in manners as in 
dress, he would not shine in palaces ; he is abso- 
lutely unknown and inadmissible therein ; living or 
dying, he never shall be heard of in them ; yet the 
drawing-room heroes put down beside him would 
shrivel in his presence ; he solid and unexpressive, 
they expressed to gold-leaf. But he stands well on 
the world, — as Adam did, as an Indian does, as 
Homer's heroes, Agamemnon or Achilles, do. He 
is a person whom a poet of any clime — Milton, 
Firdusi, or Cervantes — would appreciate as being 
really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun 
and moon, rainbow and flood ; because he is, as all 
natural persons are, representative of Nature as 
much as these. 

'hat uncorrupted behavior which we admire in 
animals and in young children belongs to him, to 
the hunter, the sailor, — the man who lives in the 
presence of Nature. Cities force growth and make 
men talkative and entertaining, but they make 
them artificial. What possesses interest for us is 
the naturel of each, his constitutional excellence. 
This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely ; we 
cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it ; 
and it is this which the conversation with Nature 
cherishes and guards. / 



WORKS AND DAYS. 



WOKKS AND DAYS. 



Our nineteenth century is the age of tools. They 
grow out of our structure. " Man is the meter of 
all things," said Aristotle ; " the hand is the instru- 
ment of instruments, and the mind is the form of 
forms." The human body is the magazine of inven- 
tions, the patent office, where are the models from 
which every hint was taken. All the tools and 
engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs 
and senses. One definition of man is " an intelli- 
gence served by organs." Machines can only sec- 
ond, not supply, his unaided senses. The body is 
a meter. The eye appreciates finer differences than 
art can expose. The apprentice clings to his foot- 
rule; a practised mechanic will measure by his 
thumb and his arm with equal precision ; and a good 
surveyor will pace sixteen rods more accurately 
than another man can measure them by tape. The 
sympathy of eye and hand by which an Indian or 
a practised slinger hits his mark with a stone, or a 
wood-chopper or a carpenter swings his axe to a 
hair-line on his log, are examples ; and there is no 



152 WORKS AND DAYS. 

sense or organ wliich is not capable of exquisite 
performance. 

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our 
science ; and such is the mechanical determination 
of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, 
that use has n6t dulled our joy and pride in them ; 
and we pity our fathers for dying before steam and 
galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, 
photograph and spectroscope arrived, as cheated 
out of haK their human estate. These arts open 
great gates of a future, promising to make the 
world plastic and to lift human life out of its beg- 
gary to a god-like ease and power. 

Our century to be sure had inherited a tolerable 
apparatus. We had the compass, the printing- 
press, watches, the spiral spring, the barometer, 
the telescope. Yet so many inventions have been 
added that life seems almost made over new ; and 
as Leibnitz said of Newton, that "if he reckoned 
all that had been done by mathematicians from the 
beginning of the world down to Newton, and what 
had been done by him, his would be the better 
half," so one might say that the inventions of the 
last fifty years counterpoise those of the fifty cen- 
turies before them. For the vast production and 
manifold application of iron is new ; and our com- 
mon and indispensable utensils of house and farm 
are new ; the sewing-machine, the power-loom, the 



WORKS AND DAYS. 153 

McCormick reaper, tlie mowing-machines, gas-light, 
lucifer matches, and the immense productions of 
the laboratory, are new in this century, and one 
franc's worth of coal does the work of a laborer 
for twenty days. 

Why need I speak of steam, the enemy of space 
and time, with its enormous strength and delicate 
applicability, which is made in hospitals to bring a 
bowl of gruel to a sick man's bed, and can twist 
beams of iron like candy-braids, and vies with the 
forces which upheaved and doubled over the geo- 
logic strata? Steam is an apt scholar and a strong- 
shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its 
work. It abeady walks about the field like a man, 
and will do anything required of it. It irrigates 
crops, and drags away a mountain. It must sew 
our shirts, it must drive our gigs ; taught by Mr. 
Babbage, it must calculate interest and logarithms. 
Lord Chancellor Thurlow thought it might be made 
to draw bills and answers in chancery. If that 
were satire, it is yet coming to render many higher 
services of a mechanico-intellectual kind, and will 
leave the satire short of the fact. 

How excellent are the mechanical aids we have 
applied to the human body, as in dentistry, in vac- 
cination, in the rhinoplastic treatment ; in the beau- 
tiful aid of ether, like a finer sleep ; and in the 
boldest promiser of all, — the transfusion of the 



154 WORKS AND DAYS. 

blood, — wMch, in Paris, it was claimed, enables a 
man to change bis blood as often as his linen ! 

What of this dapper caoutchouc and gutta-per- 
cha, which make water-pipes and stomach-pumps, 
belting for mill-wheels, and diving bells, and rain- 
proof coats for all climates, which teach us to defy 
the wet, and put every man on a footing with the 
beaver and the crocodile ? What of the grand tools 
with which we engineer, like kobolds and enchant- 
ers, tunnelling Alps, canalling the American Isth- 
mus, piercing the Arabian desert ? In Massachu- 
setts we fight the sea successfully with beach-grass 
and broom, and the blowing sand-barrens with pine 
plantations. The soil of Holland, once the most 
populous in Europe, is below the level of the sea. 
Egypt, where no rain fell for three thousand years, 
now, it is said, thanks Mehemet Ali's irrigations 
and planted forests for late - returning showers. 
The old Hebrew king said, " He makes the wrath 
of man to praise him." And there is no argument 
of theism better than the grandeur of ends brought 
about by paltr}'- means. The chain of Western 
railroads from Chicago to the Pacific has planted 
cities and civilization in less time than it costs to 
bring an orchard into bearing. 

What shall we say of the ocean telegraph, that 
extension of the eye and ear, whose sudden per- 
formance astonished mankind as if the intellect 



WORKS AND DAYS. 155 

were taking the brute earth itself into training, and 
shooting the first thrills of life and thought through 
the unwilling brain ? 

There does not seem any limit to these new infor- 
mations of the same Spirit that made the elements 
at first, and now, through man, works them. Art 
and power will go on as they have done, — will 
make day out of night, time out of space, and space 
out of time. 

invention breeds invention. No sooner is the 
electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the 
very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut 
is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants 
for his balloon. When commerce is vastly en- 
larged, California and Australia expose the gold it 
needs. When Europe is over-populated, America 
and Australia crave to be peopled ; and so through- 
out, every chance is timed, as if Nature, who made 
the lock, knew where to find the key. 

Another result of our arts is the new intercourse 
which is surprising us with new solutions of the 
embarrassing political problems. The intercourse 
is not new, but the scale is new. Our selfishness 
would have held slaves or would have excluded 
from a quarter of the planet all that are not born 
on the soil of that quarter. Our politics are dis- 
gusting ; but what can they help or hinder when 
from time to time the primal instincts are im- 



156 WORKS AND DAYS. 

pressed on masses of mankind, when the nations 
are in exodus and flux ? Nature loves to cross her 
stocks, — and German, Chinese, Turk, Russ, and 
Kanaka were putting out to sea, and intermarry- 
ing race with race ; and commerce took the hint, 
and ships were built capacious enough to carry the 
people of a county. 

This thousand-handed art has introduced a new 
element into the state. The science of power is 
forced to remember the power of science. Civiliza- 
tion mounts and climbs. Malthus, when he stated 
that the mouths went on multiplying geometrically 
and the food only arithmetically, forgot to say that 
the human mind was also a factor in political econ- 
omy, and that the augmenting wants of society 
would be met by an augmenting power of inven- 
tion. 

Yes, we have a pretty artillery of tools now in 
our social arrangements : we ride four times as fast 
as our fathers did ; travel, grind, weave, forge, 
plant, till, and excavate better. We have new 
shoes, gloves, glasses, and gimlets ; we have the cal- 
culus ; we have the newspaper, which does its best 
to make every square acre of land and sea give an 
account of itself at your breakfast-table ; we have 
money, and paper money ; we have language, — 
the finest tool of all, and nearest to the mind. 
jN^uch will have more. Man flatters himself that 



WORKS AND DAYS. 157 

his command over nature must increase. Things 
begin to obey him. We are to have the balloon 
yet, and the next war will be fought in the air. 
We may yet find a rose water that will wash the 
nesrro white. He sees the skull of the Eno^lish race 
changing from its Saxon type under the exigencies 
of American Kfe. 

Tantalus, who in old times was seen vainly try- 
ing to quench his thirst with a flowing stream which 
ebbed whenever he approached it, has been seen / 
again lately. He is in Paris, in New York, in 
"Boston. He is now in great spirits ; thinks he 
shall reach it yet ; thinks he shall bottle the wave. 
It is however getting a little doubtful. ' Things 
have an ugly look still. No matter how many 
centuries of culture have preceded, the new man 
always finds himself standing on the brink of chaos, 
always in a crisis. Can anybody remember when 
the times were not hard, and money not scarce? 
Can anybody remember when sensible men, and the 
right sort of men, and the right sort of women, 
were plentiful? Tantalus begins lo think steam 
a delusion, and galvanism no better than it should 
be. 

[any facts concur to show that we must look 
deeper for our salvation than to steam, photographs, 
balloons or astronomy. These tools have some 
questionable properties. They are reagents. Ma 



158 WORKS AND DAYS. 

cliinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, 
tFe maeliinist a machine. If you do not use the 
tools, jthey use ^you. All tools are in one sense 
edge-tools, and dangerous. A man builds a fine 
housfe ; and now he has a master, and a task for 
life : he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in 
repair, the rest of his days. A man has a reputa- 
tion, and is no longer free, but must respect that. 
A man makes a picture or a book, and, if it suc- 
ceeds, 't is often the worse for him. I saw a brave 
man the other day, hitherto as free as the hawk or 
the fox of the wilderness, constructing his cabinet 
of drawers for shells, eggs, minerals, and mounted 
birds. It was easy to see that he was amusing 
himself with making pretty links for his own 
limbs. 

Then the political economist thinks " 't is doubt- 
ful if all the mechanical inventions that ever existed 
have lightened the day's toil of one human being." 
The machine unmakes the man. Now that the 
machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. 
Every new step in improving the engine restricts 
one more act of the engineer, — unteaches him. 
Once it took Archimedes; now it only needs a 
fireman, and a boy to know the coppers, to pull up 
the handles or mind the water-tank. But when 
the engine breaks, they can do nothing. 

What sickening details in the daily journals ! I 



WORKS AND DAYS. 159 

believe tliey have ceased to publish the " Newgate 
Calendar " and the " Pirate's Own Book " since the 
family newspapers, namely the " New York Trib- 
une " and the " London Times " have quite super- 
seded them in the freshness as well as the horror of 
their records of crime. Politics were never more 
corrupt and brutal ; and Trade, that pride and dar- 
ling of our ocean, that educator of nations, that ben- 
efactor in spite of itself, ends in shameful default- 
ing, bubble, and bankruptcy, all over the world. 

Of course we resort to the enumeration of his 
arts and inventions as a measure of the worth of 
man. But if, with all his arts, he is a felon, we 
cannot assume the mechanical skill or chemical re- 
sources as the measure of worth. Let us try another 
gauge. 

What have these arts done for the character, for 
the worth of mankind ? Are men better ? 'T is 
sometimes questioned whether morals have not de- 
clined as the arts have ascended. Here are great 
arts and little men. Here is greatness begotten of 
paltriness. We cannot trace the triumphs of civil- 
ization to such benefactors as we wish. The great- 
est meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering 
Trade. Every victory over matter ought to recom- 
mend to man the worth of his nature. But now 
one wonders who did all this good. Look up the 
inventors. Each has his own knack ; his genius is 



160 WORKS AND DAYS. 

in veins and spots. But the great, equal, sym- 
metrical brain, fed from a great heart, you shall not 
find. Every one has more to hide than he has to 
show, or is lamed by his excellence. 'T is too 
plain that with the material power the moral prog- 
ress has not kept pace. It appears that we have 
not made a judicious investment. Works and days 
were offered us, and we took works._ 

The new study of the Sanskrit has shown us the 
origin of the old names of God, — Dyaus, Deus, 
Zeus, Zeu pater, Jupiter, — names of the sun, still 
recognizable through the modifications of our ver- 
nacular words, importing that the Day is the Di- 
vine Power and Manifestation, and indicating that 
those ancient men, in their attempts to express 
the Supreme Power of the universe, called him the 
Day, and that this name was accepted by all the 
tribes. 

Hesiod wrote a poem which he called " Works 
and Days," in which he marked the changes of the 
Greek year, instructing the husbandman at the ris- 
ing of what constellation he might safely sow, when 
to reap, when to gather wood, when the sailor 
might launch his boat in security from storms, and 
what admonitions of the planets he must heed. It 
is full of economies for Grecian life, noting the 
proper age for marriage, the rules of household 
thrift, and of hospitality. The poem is f uU of piety 






WORKS AND DAYS. 161 

as well as prudence, and is adapted to all merid- 
ians by adding the ethics of works and of days. 
But he has not j)ushed his study of days into such 
inquiry and analysis as they invite. 

farmer said " he should like to have all the 
land that joined his own." Bonaparte, who had the 
same appetite, endeavored to make the Mediter- 
ranean a French lake. Czar Alexander was more 
expansive, and wished to call the Pacific my ocean ; 
and the Americans were obliged to resist his at- 
tempts to make it a close sea. But if he had the^ 
earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond he 
would be a pauper still. He only is rich wlio owns 



the^ay. There is no king, rich man, fairy, or 
demon who possesses such power as that. The days 
are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They are 
of the least pretension and of the greatest capacity 
of anything that exists. They come and go like 
muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant 
friendly party ; but they say nothing, and if we do 
not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as / 
silently away. 

How the day fits itself to the mind, winds itself 
round it like a fine drapery, clothing all its fancies ! 
Any holiday communicates to us its color. We 
wear its cockade and favors in our humor. Re- 
member what boys think in the morning of " Elec- 
tion day," of the Fourth of July, of Thanksgiving 

VOL. VII. 11 



162 WORKS AND DAYS. 

or Christmas. The very stars in their courses 
wink to them of nuts and cakes, bonbons, presents, 
and fire-works. Cannot memory still descry the 
old school-house and its porch, somewhat hacked by 
jack-knives, where you spun tops and snapped mar- 
bles ; and do you not recall that life was then cal- 
endared by moments, threw itself into nervous 
knots of glittering hours, even as now, and. not 
spread itself abroad an equable felicity ? In college 
terms, and in years that followed, the young gradu- 
ate, when the Commencement anniversary returned, 
though he were in a swamp, would see a festive 
light and find the air faintly echoing with plan si ve 
academic thunders. In solitude and in the coun- 
try, what dignity distinguishes the holy time ! The 
old Sabbath, or Seventh Day, white with the relig- 
ions of unknown thousands of years, when this hal- 
lowed hour dawns out of the deep, — a clean page, 
which the wise may inscribe with truth, whilst the 
savage scrawls it with fetishes, — the cathedral mu- 
sic of history breathes through it a psalm to our 
solitude. 

So, in the common experience of the scholar, the 
weather fits his moods. A thousand tunes the vari- 
able wind plays, a thousand spectacles it brings, 
and each is the frame or dwelling of a new spirit. 
•I used formerly to choose my time with some nicety 
for each favorite book. One author is good for 



WORKS AND DAYS. 163 

winter, and one for the dog-days. The scholar 
must look long for the right hour for Plato's Ti- 
mseus. At last the elect morning arrives, the early- 
dawn, — a few lights conspicuous in the heaven, as 
of a world just created and still becoming, — and 
in its wide leisure we dare open that book. 

There are days when the great are near us, when 
there is no frown on their brow, no condescension 
even ; when they take us by the hand, and we share 
their thought. There are days which are the car- 
nival of the year. The angels assume flesh, and 
repeatedly become visible. The imagination of the 
gods is excited and rushes on every side into forms. 
Yesterday not a bird peeped ; the world was barren, 
peaked, and pining : to-day 't is inconceivably pop- 
ulous ; creation swarms and meliorates. 

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp \ 
and woof are past and future time. They are 
majestically dressed, as if every god brought a 
thread to the skyey web. 'T is pitiful the things 
by which we are rich or poor, — a matter of coins, 
coats, and carpets, a little more or less stoiie, or 
wood, or paint, the fashion of a cloak or hat ; like 
the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud 
in the possession of a glass bead or a red feather, 
and the rest miserable in the want of it. But the 
treasures which Nature spent itself to amass, — the 
secular, refined, composite anatomy of man, which 



y 



164 WORKS AND DAYS. 

all strata go to form, wliich the prior races, from 
infusory and saurian, existed to ripen; the sur- 
rounding plastic natures ; the earth with its foods ; 
the intellectual, temperamenting air ; the sea with 
its invitations ; the heaven deep with worlds ; and 
the answering brain and nervous structure replying 
to these ; the eye that looketh into the deeps, which 
again look back to the eye, abyss to abyss ; — these, 
not like a glass bead, or the coins or carpets, are 
given immeasurably to all. 

This miracle is hurled into every beggar's hands. 
The blue sky is a covering for a market and for 
the cherubim and seraphim. The sky is the var- 
nish or glory with which the Artist has washed the 
whole work, — the verge or confines of matter and 
spirit. Nature could no farther go. Could our 
happiest dream come to pass in solid fact, — could 
a power open our eyes to behold " millions of spirit- 
ual creatures walk the earth," — I believe I should 
find that mid-plain on which they moved floored 
beneath and arched above with the same web of 
blue depth which weaves itself over me now, as I 
trudge the streets on my affairs. 

It is singular that our rich English language 
should have no word to denote the face of the 
world. Kinde was the old English term, which, 
however, filled only half the range of our fine Latin 
word, with its delicate future tense, — natura^ about 



WORKS AND DAYS. 165 

to he horn^ or what German philosophy denotes as 
a hecoming. But nothing expresses that power 
which seems to work for beauty alone. The Greek 
Kosmos did ; and therefore, with great propriety, 
Humboldt entitles his book, which recounts the last 
results of science. Cosmos. 

/ Such are the days, — the earth is the cup, the 
^sky is the cover, of the immense bounty of nature 
which is offered us for our daily aliment ; but what"" 
a force of illusion begins life with us and attends 
us to the end! We are coaxed, flattered, and 
duped, from morn to eve, from birth to death ; and 
where is the old eye that ever saw through the 
deception ? The Hindoos represent Maia, the illu- 
sory energy of Yishnu, as one of his principal attri- 
butes. As if, in this gale of warring elements 
which life is, it was necessary to bind souls to hu- 
man life as mariners in a tempest lash themselves 
to the mast and bulwarks of a ship, and Nature 
employed certain illusions as her ties and straps, — 
a rattle, a doll, an apple, for a child ; skates, a river, 
a boat, a horse, a gun, for the grooving boy ; and I 
will not begin to name those of the youth and 
adult, for they are numberless. Seldom and slowly 
the mask falls and the pupil is permitted to see 
that all is one stuff, cooked and painted under 
many counterfeit appearances. Hume's doctrine 
was that the circumstances vary, the amount of 



166 WORKS AND DAYS. 

happiness does not ; that the beggar cracking fleas 
in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke roll- 
ing bj in his chariot ; the girl equipped for her first 
ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the 
debate, had different means, but the same quantity 
of pleasant excitement. 

This element of illusion lends all its force to hide 
the values of present time. Who is he that does 
not always find himself doing something less than 
his best task ? " What are you doing ? " " O, 
nothing ; I have been doing thus, or I shall do so 
or so, but now I am only — " Ah ! poor dupe, 
will you never slip out of the web of the master 
juggler, — never learn that as soon as the irrecov- 
erable years have woven their blue glory between 
to-day and us these passing hours shall -glitter and 
draw us as the wildest romance and the homes of 
beauty and poetry? How difficult to deal erect' 
with them! The events they bring, their trade, 
entertainments, and gossip, their urgent work, all 
throw dust in the eyes and distract attention. He 
is a strong man who can look them in the eye, see 
through this juggle, feel their identity, and keep 
his own ; who can know surely that one will be like 
another to the end of the world, nor permit love, or 
death, or politics, or money, war, or pleasure, to 
draw him from his task. 

The world is always equal to itself, and every 



WORKS AND DAYS 167 

man in moments of deeper tliought is apprised that 
he is repeating the experiences of the people in the 
streets of Thebes or Byzantium. An everlastings 
Now reigns in nature, which hangs the same roses 
on our bushes which charmed the Roman and the 
Chaldaean in their hanging gardens. ' To what 
end, then,' he asks, ' should I study languages, and 
traverse countries, to learn so simple truths ? ' 

History of ancient art, excavated cities, recovery 
of books and inscriptions, — yes, the works were 
beautiful, and the history worth knowing ; and 
academies convene to settle the claims of the old 
schools. What journeys and measurements, — Nie- 
buhr and Miiller and Layard, — to identify the 
plain of Troy and Nimroud town ! And your hom- 
age to Dante costs you so much sailing ; and to 
ascertain the discoverers of America needs as much 
voyaging as the discovery cost. Poor child ! that 
flexile clay of which these old brothers moulded 
their admirable symbols was not Persian, nor Mem- 
phian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was com- 
mon lime and silex and water and sunlight, the heat 
of the blood and the heaving of the lungs ; it was 
that clay which thou heldest but now in thy foolish 
hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain 
in sepvdchres, mummy-pits, and old book-shops of 
Asia Minor, Egypt, and England. It was the 
deep to-day which all men scorn ; the rich poverty 



-^A 



K 



168 WORKS AND DAYS. 

whicli men hate ; the populous, all-loving solitude 
which men quit for the tattle of towns. He lurks, 
he hides, — he who is success, reality, joy, and 
30wer. One of the illusions is that the present^ 
hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on 
your heart that every day is the best day in the 
year. No man has learned anything rightly until 
he knows that every day is Doomsday. 'T is the 
old secret of the gods that they come in low dis-j 
guises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened 
with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their 
crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and 
130or exterior. In the Norse legend of our an- 
cestors, Odin dwells in a fisher's hut and patches 
a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a 
peasant among peasants. In the Greek legend, 
Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus, and 
Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. 
So, in our history, Jesus is born in a barn, and his 
twelve peers are fishermen. 'T is the very principle 
of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts ; 
it was the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius ; and, 
in modern times, of Swedenborg and of Halme- 
mann. The order of changes in the egg deter- 
mines the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule 
of our poets, in the legends of fairy lore, that the 
fairies largest in power were the least in size. In 
the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all. 



WORKS AND DAYS. 169 

in the form of the Madonna ; and in life, this is 
the secret of the wise. We owe to genius always I 
the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the com- \ 
mon, and showing us that divinities are sitting dis- ' 
guised in the seeming gang of gypsies and pedlers. 
In daily life, what distinguishes the master is the ^ 
using those materials he has, instead of looking j 
about for what are more renowned, or what others 
have used well. " A general," said Bonaparte, 
*' always has troops enough, if he only knows how 
to employ those he has, and bivouacs with them." 
Do not refuse the employment which the hour 
brings you, for one more ambitious. The highest 
heaven of wisdom is alike near from every point, 
and thou must find it, if at all, by methods native j 
to thyself alone. / 

That work is ever the more pleasant to the imagi- 
nation which is not now required. How wistfully, 
when we have promised to attend the working 
committee, we look at the distant hills and their 
seductions ! 

The use of history is to give value to thejDresent 
hour and its duty^ That is good which commends 
to me my country, my climate, my means and ma- 
terials, my associates. I knew a man in a certain 
religious exaltation who "thought it an honor to 
wash his own face." He seemed to me more sane 
than those who hold themselves cheap. 



\ 



170 WORKS AND DAYS. 

Zoologists may deny that liorse-hairs in the water 
change to worms, but I find that whatever is old 
corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The rever- 
ence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous 
sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the 
old, but to honor the present moment ; and we 
falsely make them excuses of the very habit which 
they hated and defied. 

Another illusion is that there is not time enough 
for our work. Yet we might reflect that though 
many creatures eat from one dish, each, according 
to its constitution, assimilates from the elements 
what belongs to it, whether time, or space, or light, 
or water, or food. A snake converts whatever prey 
the meadow yields him into snake; a fox, into fox; 
and Peter and John are working up all existence 
into Peter and John. A poor Indian chief of the 
Six Nations of New York made a wiser reply than 
any philosopher, to some one complaining that he 
had not enough time. " Well," said Eed Jacket, 
" I suppose you have all there is." 

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, 
as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But 
an old French sentence says, " God works in mo- 
ments, " — " £Jn peu d'heiire Dieu laheure.^^ We 
ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand mo- 
ments, that signify. Let the measure of time be 
spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily 



WORKS AND DAYS. 171 

long. Moments of insight, of fine personal rela- 
tion, a smile, a glance, — what ample borrowers of 
eternity they are ! Life culminates and concen- 
trates ; and Homer said, " The gods ever give to 
mortals their apportioned share of reason only on 
one day." 

I am of the opinion of the poet Wordsworth, 
that " there is no real happiness in this life but in 
intellect and virtue." I am of the opinion of Pliny, 
that " whilst we are musing on these things, we are 
adding to the length of our lives." I am of the 
opinion of Glauco, who said, " The measure of life, • 
O Socrates, is, with the wise, the speaking and 
hearing such discourses as yours." 

He only can enrich me who can recommend to 
me the space between sun and sun, 'T is the meas- 
ure of a man, — his apprehension o|a^^ For 
we do not listen with the best regard to the verses 
of a man who is only a poet, nor to his problems 
if he is only an algebraist ; but if a man is at once 
acquainted with the geometric foundations of things 
and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact 
and his arithmetic musical. And him I reckon the 
most learned scholar, not who can unearth for me 
the buried dynasties of Sesostris and Ptolemy, the 
Sothiac era, the Olympiads and consulships, but\ 
/who can unfold the theory of this particular Wed- / 
\ nesday. Can he uncover the ligaments concealed J 



172 WORKS AND DAYS. 

from all but piety, which attach the dull men and 
things we know to the "First Cause ? These pass- 
ing fifteen minutes, men think, are time, not eter- 
nity ; are low and subaltern, are but hope or mem- 
ory ; that is, the way to or the way from welfare, 
but not welfare. Can he show their tie ? That 
interpreter shall guide us from a menial and"eiee- 
mosynary existence into riches and stability. Ho 
dignifies the place where^e is. This mendicant 
America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative 
America, studious of Greece and Rome, of Eng- 
land and Germany, will take off its dusty shoes, 
will take off its glazed traveller's - cap and sit at 
home with repose and deep joy on its face. The 
world has no such landscape, the aeons of history 
no such hour, the future no equal second opportu- 
nity. Now let poets sing ! now let arts unfold ! 

One more view remains. But life is good only 
when it is magical and musical, a perfect timing 
and consent, and when we do not anatomize it. 
You must treat the days respectfully, you must be 
a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college 
professor. The world is enigmatical, — everything 
said, and everything known or done, — and mu3t 
not be taken literally, but genially. We must be 
at the top of our condition to understand anything 
rightly. You must hear the bird's song without 
attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Can- 



WORKS AND DAYS. 173 

not we be a little abstemious and obedient ? Can- 
not we let the morning be ? 

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. 
There are no straight lines. I remember well the 
foreign scholar who made a week of my youth 
happy by his visit. " The savages in the islands," 
he said, " delight to play with the surf, coming in 
on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, 
and repeat the delicious manoeuvre for hours. 
Well, human life is made up of such transits. 
There can be no greatness without abandonment.- 

/But here your very astronomy is an espionage. I 
dare not go out of doors and see the moon and 
stars, but they seem to measure my tasks, to ask 
how many lines or pages are finished since I saw 

l^them last. Not so, as I told you, was it in Belle- 
isle. The days at Belleisle were all different, and 
only joined by a perfect love of the same object. 
Just to fill the hour, — that is happiness. Fill my 
hour, ye gods, so that I shall not say, whilst I have 
done this, 'Behold, also, an hour of my life is 
gone,' — but rather, ' I have lived an hour.' " 

We do not want factitious men, who can do any 
literary or professional feat, as, to write poems, or 
advocate a cause, or carry a measure, for money ; 
or turn their ability indifferently in any particular 
direction by the strong effort of will. No, what 
has been best done in the world, — the works of 



174 WORKS AND DAYS. 

genius, — cost nothing. Ther e is_noj^ainf uljegorj;.. 
but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. 
Shakspeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its 
nest. Poems have been written between sleeping 
and waking, irresponsibly. Fancy defines herself : 

" Forms that men spy 
With the half -shut eye 
In the beams of the setting sun, am I." 

The masters painted for joy, and knew not that 
virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint 
the like in cold blood. The masters of English 
lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflores- 
cence of fine powers ; as was said of the letters 
of the Frenchwoman, — " the charming accident of 
their more charming existence." Then the poet is 
never the poorer for his song. A song is no song 
unless the circumstance is free and fine. If the 
singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no 
way of escape, I had rather have none. Those only 
^an sleep who do not care to sleep ; and those only 
write or speak best who do not too much respect 
the writing or the speaking. 

The same rule holds in science. The savant is 
often an amateur. His performance is a memoir 
to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or spiders' 
legs ; he observes as other academicians observe ; 
he is on stilts at a microscope, and his memoir 
finished and read and printed, he retreats into 



WORKS AND DAYS. 175 

his routmary existence, whicli is quite separate 
from his scientific. But in Newton, science was 
as easy as breathing ; he used the same wit to weigh 
the moon that he used to buckle his shoes ; and all 
his life was simple, wise, and majestic. So it was 
in Archimedes, — always self -same, like the sky. 
In Linnaeus, in Franklin, the like sweetness and 
equality, — no stilts, no tiptoe ; and their results 
are wholesome and memorable to all men. 

In stripping time of its illusions, in seeking to 
find what is the heart of the day, we come to the 
quality of the moment, and drop the duration alto- 
gether. It is the depth at which we live and not at 
all the surface extension that imports. We pierce 
to the eternity, of which time is the flitting sur- 
face ; and, really, the least acceleration of thought 
and the least increase of power of thought, make 
life to seem and to be of vast duration. We call 
it time ; but when that acceleration and that deep- 
ening take effect, it acquires another and a higher 
name. 

— There are people who do not need much experi- 
menting; who, after years of activity, say. We 
laiew all this before; who love at first sight and 
hate at first sight ; discern the affinities and repul- 
sions ; who do not care so much for conditions as 
others, for they are always in one condition and 
enjoy themselves ; who dictate to others and are 



176 WORKS AND DAYS. 

not dictated to ; who in their consciousness of de- 
serving success constantly slight the ordinary means 
of attaining it; who have self-existence and self- 
help ; who are suffered to be themselves in society 
who are great in the present ; who have no talents, 
or care not to have them, — being that which was 
before talent, and shall be after it, and of which 
talent seems only a tool: this is ch aracter, the 
highest name at which philosophy has arrived. 
/- 'T is not important how the hero does this or this, 
( but what he is. What he is will appear in every 
\ gesture and syllable. In this way the moment and . 
\ the character are one. 

^ It is a fine fable for the advantage of character 
over talent, the Greek legend of the strife of Jove 
and Phoebus. Phoebus challenged the gods, and 
said, " Who will outshoot the far-darting Apollo ? " 
Zeus said, " I wiU." Mars shook the lots in his 
helmet, and that of Apollo leaped out first. Apollo 
stretched his bow and shot his arrow into the ex- 
treme west. Then Zeus arose, and with one stride 
cleared the whole distance, and said, " Where shall 
I shoot? there is no space left." So the bowman's^ 
prize was adjudged to him who drew no bow. 

And this is the progress of every earnest mind ; 
from the works of man and the activity of the 
hands to a delight in the faculties which rule them ; 
from a respect to the works to a wise wonder at this 



WORKS AND DAYS. 177 

mystic element of time in wHch he is conditioned ; 

from local skills and the economy which reckons 

the amount of production per hour to the finer 

economy which respects the quality of what is 

done, and the right we have to the work, or the 

fidelity with which it flows from ourselves ; then 

to the depth of thought it betrays, looking to its 

universality, or that its roots are in eternity, not in 

time. Then it flows from character, that sublime 

/ health jwhich values one moment as another, and 

/ makes us great in all conditions, and as the only 

I deflnition we have of freedom and power. 

VOL. VII. • 12 



BOOKS. 



BOOKS. 



It is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are 
easily found ; and tlie best are but records, and 
not the things recorded ; and certainly there is di- 
lettanteism enough, and books that are merely neu- 
tral and do nothing for us. In Plato's Gorgias, 
Socrates says : " The shipmaster walks in a modest 
garb near the sea, after bringing his passengers 
from ^gina or from Pontus ; not thinking he has 
done anything extraordinary, and certainly know- 
ing that his passengers are the same and in no 
respect better than when he took them on board." 
So it is with books, for the most part : they work 
no redemption in us. The bookseller might cer- 
tainly know that his customers are in no respect 
better for the purchase and consumption of his 
wares. The volume is dear at a dollar, and after 
reading to weariness the lettered backs, we leave 
the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did without 
surprise of a surly bank director, that in bank 
parlors they estimate aU stocks of this kind as 
rubbish. 



182 BOOKS. 

But it is not less true that there are books which 
are of that importance in a man's private experi- 
ence as to verify for him the fables of Cornelius 
Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus of 
Thrace, — books which take rank in our life with 
parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so 
medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so author- 
itative, — books which are the work and the proof 
of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to 
the world which they paint, that though one shuts 
them with meaner ones, he feels his exclusion from 
them to accuse his way of living. 

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen 
library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men 
that could be picked out of all civil countries in a 
thousand years have set in best order the results of 
their learning and wisdom. The men themselves 
were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of 
interruption, fenced by etiquette ; but the thought 
which they did not uncover to their bosom friend 
is here written out in transparent words to us, the 
strangers of another age. 

We owe to books those general benefits which 
come from high intellectual action. Thus, I think, 
we often owe to them the perception of immortal- 
ity. They impart sympathetic activity to the moral 
power. Go with mean people and you think life 
is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a 



BOOKS. 183 

proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, 
with heroes and demigods standing around us, who 
will not let us sleep. Then, they address the imag- 
ination : only poetry inspires poetry. They become 
the organic culture of the time. College education 
is the reading of certain books which the common 
sense of all scholars agrees will represent the sci- 
ence already accumulated. If you know that, — 
for instance in geometry, if you have read Euclid 
and Laplace, — your opinion has some value ; if 
you do not know these, you are not entitled to give 
any opinion on the subject. Whenever any skep- 
tic of bigot claims to be heard on the questions of 
intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with 
the books of Plato, where all his pert objections 
have once for all been disposed of. If not, he has 
no right to our time. Let him go and find himself 
answered there. 

'^Meantime the colleges, whilst they provide us 
with libraries, furnish no professor of books ; and 
I think no chair is so much wanted. In a library 
we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear 
friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter 
in these paper and leathern boxes ; and though they 
know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty 
centuries for us, — some of them, — and are eager 
to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the 
law of their limbo that they must not speak until 



184 BOOKS. 

spoken to ; and as the enchanter has dressed them, 
like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of 
one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your 
chance of hitting on the right one is to be com- 
puted by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and 
Combination, — not a choice out of three caskets, 
but out of haK a million caskets, all alike. But it 
happens in our experience that in this lottery there 
are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize^ 
It seems then as if some charitable soul, after losing 
a great deal of time among the false books and 
alighting upon a few true ones which make him 
happy and wise, would do a right act in naming 
those which have been bridges or ships to carry 
him safely over dark morasses and barren oceans, 
into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and 
temples. This would be best done by those great 
masters of books who from time to time appear, — 
the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, 
Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep 
the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, 
reading purely for love of the book, would serve 
us by leaving each the shortest note of what he 
found. 

There are books; and it is practicable to read 
them, becaiise they are so few. We look over with 
a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of the 
Vatican, and the British Museum. In 1858, the 



BOOKS. 185 

number of printed books in the Imperial Library 
at Paris was estimated at eight hundred thousand 
vokimes, with an annual increase of twelve thou- 
sand volumes ; so that the number of printed books 
extant to-day may easily exceed a million. It is 
easy to count the number of pages which a diligent 
man can read in a day, and the number of years 
which human life in favorable circumstances allows 
to reading ; and to demonstrate that though he 
should read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, 
he must die in the first alcoves. But nothing can 
be more deceptive than this arithmetic, where none 
but a natural method is really pertinent. I visit 
occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can 
seldom go there without renewing the conviction 
that the best of it all is already within the four 
walls of my study at home. The inspection of the 
catalogue brings me continually back to the few 
standard writers who are on every private shelf; 
and to these it can afford only the most slight and 
casual additions. The crowds and centuries of 
books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes 
and weakeners of these few great voices of time. 

The best rule of reading mil be a method from 
nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and 
pages. It holds each student to a pursuit of his 
native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let 
him read what is proper to him, and not waste his 



186 BOOKS. 

memory on a crowd of mediocrities. As whole 
nations have derived their culture from a single 
book, — as the Bible has been the literature as 
well as the religion of large portions of Europe ; *as 
Hafiz was the eminent genius of the Persians, Con- 
fucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the Spaniards ; 
so, perhaps, the human mind would be a gainer 
if all the secondary writers were lost, — say, in 
England, all but Shakspeare, Milton, and Bacon, 
— through the profounder study so drawn to those 
wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own 
genius, let the student read one, or let him read 
many, he will read advantageously. Dr. Johnson 
said : *' Whilst you stand deliberating which book / 
your son shall read first, another boy has read both : j 
read anything five hours a day, and you will soon / 
be learned." 

Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature 
is always clarifying her water and her wine. No 
filtration can be so perfect. She does the same 
thing by books as by her gases and plants. There 
is always a selection in writers, and then a selection 
from the selection. In the first place, all books 
that get fairly into the vital air of the world were 
written by the successful class, by the affirming and 
advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands 
feel though they cannot say. There has already 
been a scrutiny and choice from many hundreds of 



BOOKS. 187 

young pens before the pamphlet or political chapter 
which you read in a fugitive journal comes to your 
eye. All these are young adventurers, who pro- 
duce their performance to the wise ear of Time, 
who sits and weighs, and, ten years hence, out of a 
million of pages rej)rints one. Again it is judged 
it is winnowed by all the winds of oj)inion, and 
what terrific selection has not passed on it before 
it can be reprinted after twenty years ; — and re- 
printed after a century ! — it is as if Minos and 
Rhadamanthus had indorsed the writing. 'T is 
therefore an economy of time to read old and famed 
books. Nothing can be preserved which is not 
good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Mar- 
tial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Eras- 
mus, More, will be superior to the average intellect. 
In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish 
betwixt notoriety and fame. 

Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the 
spa^vTi of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do 
not read what you shall learn, without asking, in 
the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said " he 
always went into stately shops ; " and good travel- 
lers stop at the best hotels ; for though they cost 
more, they do not cost much more, and there is the 
good company and the best information. In like 
manner the scholar knows that the famed books 
contain, first and last, the best thoughts and facts. 



188 BOOKS. 

Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolisli Grub 
Street is tlie gem we want. But in the best circles 
\s> the best information. If you should transfer the 
amount of your reading day by day from the news- 
paper to the standard authors But who dare 

speak of such a thing ? 

The three practical rules, then, which I have to 
offer, are, — 1. Never read any book that is not a 
year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. I 
3. Never read any but what you like ; or, in Shak- \ 
speare's phrase, — 

" No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en : 
In brief, sir, study what you most affect." 

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure; " 
but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not 
leavins: the reader what he was : he shuts the book 
a richer man. I would never willingly read any 
others than such. And I will venture, at the risk 
of inditing a list of old primers and grammars, to 
count the few books which a superficial reader must 
thanlifuUy use. 

Of the old Greek books, I think there are five 
which we cannot spare : 1. Homer, who in spite of 
Pope and all the learned uproar of centuries, has 
really the true fire and is good for simple minds, is 
the true and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies 
that place as history which nothing can supply. It 



BOOKS. 189 

holds through all literature that our best history is 
still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanskrit, and 
in Greek. English history is best known through 
Shakspeare; how much through Merlin, Robin 
Hood, and the Scottish ballads ! — the German, 
through the Nibelungenlied ; — the Spanish, through 
the Cid. Of Homer, George Chapman's is the he- 
roic translation, though the most literal prose ver- 
sion is the best of all. 2. Herodotus, whose history 
contains inestimable anecdotes, which brought it 
with the learned into a sort of disesteem ; but in 
these days, when it is found that what is most mem- 
orable of history is a few anecdotes, and that we 
need not be alarmed though we should find it not 
dull, it is regaining credit. 3. ^Eschylus, the grand- 
est of the three tragedians, who has given us under 
a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The 
" Prometheus " is a poem of the like dignity and 
scope as the Book of Job, or the Norse Edda. 
4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should 
be no end. You find in him that which you have 
already found in Homer, now ripened to thought, 
— the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier 
strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached ; as 
if Homer were the youth and Plato the finished 
man ; yet with no less security of bold and perfect 
song, when he cares to use it, and with some harp- 
strings fetched from a higher heaven. He contains 



190 BOOKS. 

the future, as he came out of the past. In Plato 
you explore modern Europe in its causes and seed, 
— all that in thought, which the history of Europe 
embodies or has yet to embody. The well-informed 
man finds himself anticipated. Plato is up with 
him too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new 
crop in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh 
suggestion of modern humanity, is there. If the 
student wish to see both sides, and justice done 
to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of ped- 
ants, and the supremacy of truth and the religious 
sentiment, he shall be contented also. Why should 
not young men be educated on this book? It 
would suffice for the tuition of the race ; to test 
their understanding, and to express their reason. 
Here is that which is so attractive to all men, — 
the literature of aristocracy shall I call it ? — the 
picture of the best persons, sentiments, and man- 
ners, by the first master, in the best times ; portraits 
of Pericles, Alcibiades, Crito, Prodicus, Protagoras, 
Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the lovely back- 
ground of the Athenian and suburban landscape. 
Or who can overestimate the images with which 
Plato has enriched the minds of men, and which 
pass like bullion in the currency of all nations ? 
Eead the " Phsedo," the " Protagoras," the " Phae- 
drus," the " Tim^us," the " Republic," and the 
" Apology of Socrates." 5., Plutarch cannot be 



BOOKS. 191 

spared from the smallest library ; first because he 
is so readable, which is much ; then that he is 
medicinal and invigorating. The lives of Cimon, 
LycurgTJs, Alexander, Demosthenes, Phocion, Mar- 
cellus, and the rest, are what history has of best. 
But this book has taken care of itself, and the 
opinion oE the world is expressed in the innumer- 
able cheap editions, which make it as accessible as 
a newspaper. But Plutarch's " Morals " is less 
known, and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader 
as I am writing to can as ill spare it as the 
" Lives." He will read in it the essays " On the 
Daemon of Socrates," " On Isis and Osiris," " On 
Progress in Virtue," " On Garrulity," " On Love ; " 
and thank anew the art of printing and the cheer- 
ful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms 
by the facility of his associations ; so that it signi- 
fies little where you open his book, you find yourself 
at the Olympian tables. His memory is like the 
Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in 
Greece was assembled ; and you are stimulated and 
recruited by lyric verses, by philosophic sentiments, 
by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the wor- 
ship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, pars- 
ley and laurel wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, 
and utensils of sacrifice. An inestimable trilogy of 
ancient social pictures are the three " Banquets " 
respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. 



192 BOOKS. 

Plutarch's lias tlie least approacli to historical accu- 
racy ; but the meeting of the Seven Wise Masters 
is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and 
discourse, and is as clear as the voice of a fife, and 
entertaining as a French novel. Xenophon's de- 
lineation of Athenian manners is an accessory to 
Plato, and supplies traits of Socrates ; whilst Plato's 
has merits of every kind, — being a repertory of 
the wisdom of the ancients on the subject of love ; 
a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive 
than Aristophanes ; and, lastly, containing that iron- 
ical eulogy of Socrates which is the source from 
which all the portraits of that philosopher current 
in Europe have been drawn. 

Of course a certain outline should be obtained of 
Greek history, in which the important moments 
and persons can be rightly set down ; but the short- 
est is the best, and if one lacks stomach for Mr. 
Grote's voluminous annals, the old slight and pop- 
ular summary of Goldsmith or of Gillies will serve. 
The valuable part is the age of Pericles and the 
next generation. And here we must read the 
" Clouds " of Aristophanes, and what more of that 
master we gain appetite for, to learn our way in 
the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny 
of Aristophanes, requiring more genius and some- 
times not less cruelty than belonged to the official 
commanders. Aristophanes is now very accessible, 



BOOKS. 193 

with much vakiable commentary, through the la- 
bors of Mitchell and Cartwright. An excellent 
popular book is J. A. St. John's "Ancient Greece ; " 
the "Life and Letters" of Niebuhr, even more 
than his Lectures, furnish leading views ; and 
Winckelmann, a Greek born out of due time, has 
become essential to an intimate knowledge of the 
Attic genius. The secret of the recent histories in 
German and in English is the discovery, owed first 
.to Wolff and later to Boeckh, that the sincere 
Greek history of that period must be drawn from 
Demosthenes, especially from the business ora- 
tions ; and from the comic poets. 

If we come down a little' by natural steps from 
the master to the disciples, we have, six or seven 
centuries later, the Platonists, who also cannot be 
skipped, — Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius, 
Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian 
said that " he was posterior to Plato in time, not 
in genius." Of Plotinus, we have eulogies by Por- 
phyry and Longinus, and the favor of the Emperor 
Gallienus, indicating the respect he inspired among 
his contemporaries. If any one who had read with 
interest the " Isis and Osiris " of Plutarch should 
then read a chapter called " Providence," by Sy- 
nesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, 
he will find it one of the majestic remains of liter- 
ature, and, like one walking in the noblest of tem- 

VOL. VII. 13 



194 BOOKS. 

pies, will conceive new gratitude to his fellow-men, 
and a new estimate of their nobility. The imagi- 
native scholar will find few stimulants to his brain 
like these writers. He has entered the Elysian 
Fields ; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods 
and daemons and dsemoniacal men, of the " azonic " 
and the " aquatic gods," daemons with fulgid eyes, 
and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted a 
little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. 
The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave 
at Delphi ; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. 
These guides speak of the gods with such depth 
and with such pictorial details, as if they had been 
bodily present at the Olympian feasts. The reader 
of these books makes new acquaintance with his 
own mind ; new regions of thought are opened. 
Jamblichus's " Life of Pythagoras " works more 
directly on the will than the others ; since Pythago- 
ras was eminently a practical person, the founder 
of a school of ascetics and socialists, a i^lanter of 
colonies, and nowise a man of abstract studies 
alone. 

The respectable and sometimes excellent transla- 
tions of Bohn's Library have done for literature 
what railroads have done for internal intercourse. 
I do not hesitate to read all the books I have 
named, and all good books, in translations. What 
is really best in any book is translatable, — any 



BOOKS. 195 

real insight or broad liiiman sentiment. Nay, I 
observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty 
moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render 
the rhytlun and music of the original into phrases 
of equal melody. The Italians have a fling at 
translators, — i traditori traduttori ; but I thank 
them. I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, 
Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the origi- 
nal, which I can procure in a good version. I like 
to be beholden to the great metropolitan English 
speech, the sea which receives tributaries from 
every region under heaven. I should as soon think 
of swimming across Charles River when I wish to 
go to Boston, as of reading all my books in origi- 
nals when I have them rendered for me in my 
mother-tongue. 

For history there is great choice of ways to 
bring the student through early Rome. If he can 
read Livy, he has a good book; but one of the 
short English compends, some Goldsmith or Fergu- 
son, should be used, that will place in the cycle the 
bright stars of Plutarch. The poet Horace is the 
eye of the Augustan age ; Tacitus, the wisest of 
historians ; and Martial will give him Roman man- 
ners, — and some very bad ones, — in the early 
days of the Empire : but Martial must be read, if 
read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring 
him to Gibbon, who will take him in charge and 



196 BOOKS. 

convey Mm with abundant entertainment down — 
with notice of all remarkable objects on the way — 
through fourteen hundred years of time. He can- 
not spare Gibbon, with his vast reading, with such 
wit and continuity of mind, that, though never pro- 
found, his book is one of the conveniences of civili- 
zation, like the new railroad from ocean to ocean, 
— and, I think, will be sure to send the reader to 
his " Memoirs of Himself," and the " Extracts 
from my Journal," and " Abstracts of my Read- 
ings," which will spur the laziest scholar to emula-* 
tion of his prodigious performance. 

Now having our idler safe down as far as the 
fall of Constantinople in 1453, he is in very good 
courses ; for here are trusty hands waiting for him. 
The cardinal facts of European history are soon 
learned. There is Dante's poem, to open the Ital- 
ian Republics of the Middle Age ; Dante's " Vita 
Nuova," to explain Dante and Beatrice ; and Boc- 
caccio's " Life of Dante," a great man to describe 
a greater. To help us, perhaps a volume or two 
of M. Sismondi's " Italian Republics " will be as 
good as the entire sixteen. When we come to 
Michael Angelo, his Sonnets and Letters must be 
read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our day, by 
Herman Grimm. Eor the Church and the Feudal 
Institution, Mr. Hallam's "Middle Ages" will fur- 
nish, if superficial, yet readable and conceivable 
outlines. 



BOOKS. 197 

The " Life of the Emperor Charles Y.," by the 
useful Robertson, is still the key of the following 
age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther, Eras- 
mus, Melanchthon, Francis I., Henry YIIL, Eliza- 
beth, and Henry IV. of France, are his contem- 
poraries. It is a time of seeds and expansions, 
whereof our recent civilization is the fruit. 

If now the relations of England to European af- 
fairs bring him to British ground, he is arrived at 
the very moment when modern history takes new 
proportions. He can look back for the legends 
and mythology to the " Younger Edda " and the 
" Heimskringla " of Snorro Sturleson, to Mallet's 
" Northern Antiquities," to Ellis's " Metrical Ro- 
mances," to Asser's " Life of AKred" and Vener- 
able Bede, and to the researches of Sharon Turner 
and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelli- 
gent guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the 
richest' period of the English mind, with the chief 
men of action and of thought which that nation has 
produced, and with a pregnant future before him. 
Here he has Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, 
Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick ; and Milton, 
Marvell, and Dryden, not long after. 

In reading history, he is to prefer the history of 
individuals. He will not repent the time he gives 
to Bacon, — not if he read the " Advancement of 



198 BOOKS. 

Learning," the " Essays," the " Novum Organum," 
the " History of Henry VII.," and then all the 
" Letters " (especially those to the Earl of Devon- 
shire, explaining the Essex business), and aU but 
his " Apophthegms." 

The task is aided by the strong mutual light 
which these men shed on each other. Thus, the 
works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind all 
these fine persons together, and to the land to which 
they belong. He has written verses to or on all 
his notable contemporaries ; and what with so many 
occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in his 
" Discoveries," and the gossiping record of his 
opinions in his conversations with Drummond of 
Hawthornden, he has really illustrated the England 
of his time, if not to the same extent yet much in 
the same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the 
persons and places of Scotland. Walton, Chap- 
man, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also 
to the times. 

Among the best books are certain Autobiogra- 
phies ; as, St. Augustine's Confessions ; Benvenuto 
Cellini's Life ; Montaigne's Essays ; Lord Herbert 
of Cherbury's Memoirs ; Memoirs of the Cardinal 
de Retz ; Rousseau's Confessions ; Linriseus's Di- 
ary ; Gibbon's, Hume's, Franklin's, Burns's, Al- 
fieri's, Goethe's, and Haydon's Autobiographies. 

Another class of books closely allied to these, and 



BOOKS. 199 

of like interest, are those which may be called 
Table- Talks : of which the best are Saadi's Gru- 
listan; Luther's Table -Talk; Aubrey's Lives; 
Spence's anecdotes; Selden's Table -Talk; Bos- 
well's Life of Johnson; Eckermann's Conversa- 
tions with Goethe; Coleridge's Table -Talk; and 
Hazlitt's Life of Northcote. ^ 

There is a class whose value I should designate 
as Favorites : such as ^roissart's Chronicles ; 
Southey's Chronicle of the Cid ; Cervantes; Sul- 
ly's Memoirs ; Rabelais ; Montaigne ; Izaak Wal- 
ton ; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey; 
Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Clarendon ; Doctor 
Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his 
times ; Lamb ; Landor ; and De Quincey ; — a list, 
of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent 
on individual caprice. Many men are as tender 
and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilec- 
tions. Indeed, a man's library is a sort of harem, 
and I observe that tender readers have a great pu- 
dency in showing their books to a stranger. 

The annals of bibliography afford many examples 
of the delirious extent to which book-fancying can 
go, when the legitimate delight in a book is trans- 
ferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This 
mania reached its height about the beginning of the 
present century. For an autograph of Shakspeare 
one hmidred and fifty-five guineas were given. In 



200 BOOKS. 

May, 1812, the library of tlie Duke of Roxburgh 
was sold. The sale lasted forty - two days, — we 
abridge the story from Dibdin, — and among the 
many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio published 
by Yaldarfer, at Venice, in 1571 ; the only perfect 
copy of this edition. Among the distinguished 
company which attended the sale were the Duke 
of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of 
Marlborough, then Marquis of Blandford. The 
bid stood at five hundred guineas. " A thousand 
guineas," said Earl Spencer : " And ten," added 
the Marquis. You might hear a pin drop. All eyes 
were bent on the bidders. Now they talked apart, 
now ate a biscuit, now made a bet, but without the 
least thought of yielding one to the other. But 
to pass over some details, — the contest proceeded 
until the Marquis said, " Two thousand pounds." 
Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general 
of useless bloodshed and waste of powder, and had 
paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord Althorp 
with long steps came to his side, as if to bring his 
father a fresh lance to renew the fight. Father 
and son whispered together, and Earl Spencer ex- 
claimed, "Two thousand two hundred and fifty 
pounds ! " An electric shock went through the 
assembly. " And ten," quietly added the Marquis. 
There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer 
fall, he paused; the ivory instrument swept the 



BOOKS. 201 

air ; the spectators stood dumb, when the hammer 
fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest 
shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was 
heard in the libraries of Rome, Milan, and Venice. 
Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five hundred years, 
and M. Van Praet groped in vain among the royal 
alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Val- 
darfer Boccaccio. 

Another class I distinguish by the term Vocabu- 
laries. Burton's " Anatomy of Melancholy " is a 
book of great learning. To read it is like reading 
in a dictionary. 'T is an inventory to remind us 
how many classes and species of facts exist, and, 
in observing into what strange and multiplex by- 
ways learning has strayed, to infer our opulence. 
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There 
is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is 
full of suggestion, — the raw material of possible 
poems and histories. Nothing is wanting but a lit- 
tle shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out 
of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa " On the 
Vanity of Arts and Sciences " is a specimen of that 
scribatiousness which grew to be the habit of the 
gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern 
Germans, they read a literature while other mortals 
read a few books. They read voraciously, and must 
disburden themselves ; so they take any general 
topic, as Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or Praise 



202 BOOKS. 

of Folly, and write and quote without method or 
end. Now and then out of that affluence of their 
learning comes a fine sentence from Theophrastus, 
or Seneca, or Boethius, but no high method, no in- 
spiring efflux. But one cannot afford to read for a 
few sentences ; they are good only as strings of sug- 
gestive words. 

There is another class, more needful to the pres- 
ent age, because the currents of custom run now in 
another direction and leave us dry on this side; 
— I mean the Imaginative. A right metaphysics 
) should do justice to the co-ordinate powers of Imag- 
/ ination. Insight, Understanding, and Will. Poetry, 
with its aids of Mythology and Romance, must be 
well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men 
are ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein 
everything that is not ciphering, that is, which does 
not serve the tyrannical animal, is hustled out of 
sight. Our orators and writers are of the same 
poverty, and in this rag-fair neither the Imagina- 
tion, the great awakening power, nor the Morals, 
creative of genius and of men, are addressed. But 
though orator and poet be of this hunger party, 
the capacities remain. We must have symbols. 
The child asks you for a story, and is thankful for 
the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with 
meaning. The man asks for a novel, — that is, 
asks leave for a few hours to be a poet, and to 



BOOKS. 203 

paint things as they ought to be. The youth asks 

for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the 

theatre. What private heavens can we not open, 

by yielding to all the suggestion of rich music ! We 

must have idolatries, mythologies, — some swing ^J 

/ and verge for the creative power lying coiled and \ 

If cramped here, driving ardent natures to insanity } 

and crime if it do not find vent. Without the I 

I 
great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a ^ 

man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering crea- / 
^ture. These are his becoming draperies, which 
warm and adorn him. Whilst the prudential and 
economical tone of society starves the imagination, 
affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. 
The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagina- 
tion finds. Everything else pins it down, and men 
flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, 
Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. 
Their education is neglected ; but the circulating- 
library and the theatre, as well as the trout-fishing, 
the Notch Mountains, the Adirondack country, the 
tour to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills and the 
Ghauts, make such amends as they can. 

The imagination infuses a certain volatility and 
intoxication. It has a flute which sets the atoms 
of our frame in a dance, like planets ; and once so 
liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the mu- 
sic, they never quite subside to their old stony state. 



204 BOOKS. 

But what is the imagination ? Only an arm or 
weapon of the interior energy ; only the precursor 
of the reason. And books that treat the old ped- 
antries of the world, our times, places, professions, 
customs, opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, 
and distribute things, not after the usages of Amer- 
ica and Europe but after the laws of right reason, 
and with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, 
put us on our feet again, enable us to form an 
original judgment of our duties, and suggest new 
thoughts for to-morrow. 

"Lucrezia Floriani," "Le Pdche de M. Antoine," 
" Jeanne," and " Consuelo," of George Sand, are 
great steps from the novel of one termination, 
which we all read twenty years ago. Yet how far 
off from life and manners and motives the novel 
still is ! Life lies about us dumb ; the day, as we 
know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories 
are to the plots of real life what the figures in " La 
Belle Assemblee," which represent the fashion of 
the month, are to portraits. But the novel will 
find the way to our interiors one day, and will not 
always be the novel of costume merely. I do not 
think it inoperative now. So much novelrread- 
ing cannot leave the young men and maidens un- 
touched ; and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity 
to the day. The young study noble behavior ; and 
as the player in " Consuelo " insists that he and his 



BOOKS. 205 

colleagues on the boards have taught princes the 
fine etiquette and strokes of grace and dignity which 
they practise with so much effect in their villas 
and among their dependents, so I often see traces 
of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy 
and brilliancy of young midshipmen, collegians, 
and clerks. Indeed, when one observes how ill and 
ugly people make their loves and quarrels, 't is pity 
they should not read novels a little more, to import 
the fine generosities and the clear, firm conduct, 
wliich are as becoming in the unions and separa- 
tions which love effects under shingle roofs as in 
palaces and among illustrious personages. ^ 

In novels the most serious questions are begin- 
ning to be discussed. What made the popularity 
of "Jane Eyre," but that a central question was 
answered in some sort? The question there an- 
swered in regard to a \dcious marriage will always 
be treated according to the habit of the party. A 
person of commanding individualism will answer 
it as Rochester does, — as Cleopatra, as Milton, as 
George Sand do, — magnifying the exception into 
a rule, dwarfing the world into an exception. A 
person of less courage, that is of less constitution, 
will answer as the heroine does, — giving way to 
fate, to conventionalism, to the actual state and 
doings of men and women. 

For the most part, our novel-reading is a passion 



206 BOOKS. 

for results. We admire parks, and liigh-born beau- 
ties, and the homage of drawing-rooms and parlia- 
ments. They make us skeptical, by giving promi- 
nence to wealth and social position. 

I remember when some peering eyes of boys dis- 
covered that the oranges hanging on the boughs 
of an orange-tree in a gay piazza were tied to the 
twigs by thread. I fear 't is so with the novelist's 
prosperities. Nature has a magic by which she 
fits the man to his fortunes, by making them the 
fruit of his character. But the novelist plucks this 
event here and that fortune there, and ties them 
rashly to his figures, to tickle the fancy of his 
readers with a cloying success or scare them with 
shocks of tragedy. And so, on the whole, 'tis a 
juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder 
by feats which only oddly combine acts that we 
do every day. There is no new element, no power, 
no furtherance. 'Tis only confectionery, not the 
raising of new corn. Great is the poverty of their 
inventions. She was heautiful and he fell in love. 
Money, and killing, and the Wandering Jew, and 
persuading the lover that his mistress is betrothed 
to another, these are the main-springs ; new names, 
but no new qualities in the men and women. Hence 
the vain endeavor to keep any bit of this fairy gold 
which has rolled like a brook through our hands. A 
thousand thoughts awoke ; great rainbows seemed 



BOOKS. 207 

to span the sky, a morning among the mountains ; 
but we close the book and not a ray remains in the 
memory of evening. But this passion for romance, 
and this disappointment, show how much we need 
real elevations and pure poetry : that which shall 
show us, in morning and night, in stars and moun- 
tains and in all the plight and circumstance of 
men, the analogous of our own thoughts, and a like 
imj)ression made by a just book and by the face of 
Nature. V 

If our times are sterile in genius, we must cheer 
us with books of rich and believing men who had 
atmosphere and amplitude about them. Every 
good fable, every mythology, every biography from 
a religious age, every passage of love, and even 
philosophy and science, when they proceed from 
an intellectual integrity and are not detached and 
critical, have the imaginative element. The Greek 
fables, the Persian history (Firdusi), the " Younger 
Edda" of the Scandinavians, the "Chronicle of the 
Cid," the poem of Dante, the Sonnets of Michel 
Angelo, the English drama of Shakspeare, Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, and Ford, and even the prose 
of Bacon and Milton, — in our time the Ode of 
Wordsworth, and the poems and the prose of 
Goethe, have this enlargement, and inspire hopo 
afid generous attempts. 

There is no room left, — and yet I might as well 



208 BOOKS. 

not have begun as to leave out a class of books 
which are the best : I mean the Bibles of the world,.-^ 
or the sacred books of each nation, which express 
for each the supreme result of their experience. 
After the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, which 
constitute the sacred books of Christendom, these 
are, the Desatir of the Persians, and the Zoroas- 
trian Oracles ; the Vedas and Laws of Menu ; 
the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagvat 
Geeta, of the Hindoos ; the books of the Buddhists ; 
the " Chinese Classic,"- of four books, containing 
the wisdom of Confucius and Mencius. Also such 
other books as have acquired a semi-canonical au- 
thority in the world, as expressing the highest sen- 
timent and hope of nations. Such are the " Her- 
mes Trismegistus," pretending to be Egyptian re- 
mains ; the " Sentences " of Epictetus ; of Marcus 
Antoninus ; the " Yishnu Sarma " of the Hindoos ; 
the " Gulistan " of Saadi ; the " Imitation of Christ," 
of Thomas a Kempis ; and the " Thoughts " of 
Pascal. 

All these books are the majestic expressions of 
the universal conscience, and are more to our daily 
purpose than this year's almanac or this day's news- 
paper. But they are for the closet, and to be read 
on the bended knee. Their communications are 
not to be given or taken with the lips and the end 
of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and 



BOOKS. 209 

with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give 
and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes 
absorb and enact them. They are not to be held 
by letters printed on a page, but are living charac- 
ters translatable into every tongue and form of life. 
I read them on lichens and bark ; I watch them on 
waves on the beach ; they fly in birds, they creep 
in worms ; I detect them in laughter and blushes 
and eye-sparkles of men and women. These are 
Scriptures which the missionary might well carry 
over prairie, desert, and ocean, to Siberia, Japan, 
Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which 
is in them journeys faster than he, and greets him 
on his arrival, — was there already long before him. 
The missionary must be carried by it, and find it 
there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography 
in these things? We call them Asiatic, we call 
them primeval ; but perhaps that is only optical, for 
Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as 
good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. 
Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one 
or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes 
millenniums to make a Bible. 

These are a few of the books which the old and 
the later times have yielded us, which will reward 
the time spent on them. In comparing the num- 
ber of good books with the shortness of life, many 
might well be read by proxy, if we had good 

VOL. VII. 14 



210 BOOKS. 

proxies ; and it would be well for sincere yonng 
men to borrow a hint from the French Institute 
and the British Association, and as they divide the 
whole body into sections, each of which sits upon 
and reports of certain matters confided to it, so let 
each scholar associate himself to such persons as he 
can rely on, in a literary club, in which each shall 
undertake a single work or series for which he is 
qualified. For example, how attractive is the 
whole literature of the " Koman de la Eose," the 
"Fabliaux," and the gaie science of the French 
Troubadours ! Yet who in Boston has time for 
that ? But one of our company shall undertake it, 
shall study and master it, and shall report on it as 
under oath ; shall give us the sincere result as it 
lies in his mind, adding nothing, keeping nothing 
back. Another member meantime shall as honestly 
search, sift, and as truly report, on British mythol- 
ogy, the Round Table, the histories of Brut, Merlin, 
and Welsh poetry ; a third on the Saxon Chroni- 
cles, Eobert of Gloucester, and William of Malmes- 
bury ; a fourth, on Mysteries, Early Drama, " Gesta 
Eomanorum," Collier, and Dyce, and the Camden 
Society. Each shall give us his grains of gold, 
after the washing ; and every other shall then de- 
cide whether this is a book indispensable to him 
also. 



CLUBS. 



CLUBS. 



We are delicate macliines, and require nice treat- 
ment to get from us the maximum of power and 
pleasure. We need tonics, but must have those 
that cost little or no reaction. The flame of life 
burns too fast in pure oxygen, and nature has tem- 
pered the air with nitrogen. So thought is the na- 
tive air of the mind, yet pure it is a poison to our 
mixed constitution, and soon burns up the bone- 
house of man, unless tempered with affection and 
coarse practice in the material world. Varied foods, 
climates, beautiful objects, — and especially the al- 
ternation of a large variety of objects, — are the 
necessity of this exigent system of ours. But our 
tonics, our luxuries, are force-pumps which exhaust 
the strength they pretend to supply^ and of all the 
cordials known to us, the best, safest, and most 
exhilarating, with the least harm, is society; and 
every healthy and efficient mind passes a large 
part of life in the company most easy to him. 

We seek society with very different aims, and 
the staple of conversation is widely unlike in its 



214 CLUBS. 

circles. Sometimes it is facts, — running from those 
of daily necessity, to the last results of science, — 
and has all degrees of importance ; sometimes it is 
love, and makes the balm of our early and of our 
latest days ; sometimes it is thought, as from a per- 
son who is a mind only ; sometimes a singing, as if 
the heart poured out all like a bird ; sometimes 
experience. With some men it is a debate; at 
the approach of a dispute they neigh like horses. 
Unless there be an argument, they thiix!. nothing 
is doing. Some talkers excel in the precision with 
which they formulate their thoughts, so that you 
get from them somewhat to remember ; others lay- 
criticism asleep by a charm. Especially women 
use words that are not words, — as steps in a dance 
are not steps, — but reproduce the genius of that 
they speak of ; as the sound of some bells makes us 
think of the bell merely, whilst the church-chimes 
in the distance bring the church and its serious 
memories before us. Opinions are accidental in 
people, — have a poverty-stricken air. A man valu- 
ing himself as the organ of this or that dogma is a 
dull companion enough ; but opinion native to the 
speaker is sweet and refreshing, and inseparable 
from his image. Neither do we by any means al- 
ways go to people for conversation. How often to 
say nothing, — and yet must go ; as a child will 
long for his companions, but among them plays by 



CLUBS, 215 

himself. 'T is only presence which we want. But 
one thing is certain, — at some rate, intercourse we 
must have. The experience of retired men is pos- 
itive, — that we lose our days and are barren of 
thought for want of some person to talk with. The 
understanding can no more empty itself by its own 
action than can a deal box. 

The clergyman walks from house to house all day 
all the year to give people the comfort of good talk. 
The physician helps them mainly in the same way, 
by healthy talk giving a right tone to the patient's 
mind. The dinner, the wallc, the fireside, all have 
that for their main end. 

See how Nature has secured the communication 
of knowledge. 'Tis certain that money does not 
more burn in a boy's pocket than a piece of news 
burns in our memory until we can tell it. And in 
higher activity of mind, every new perception is 
attended with a thrill of pleasure, and the impart- 
ing of it to others is also attended with pleasure. 
/Thought is the child of the intellect, and this child 
\ is conceived with joy and born with joy. 

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of 
the student. The affection or sympathy helps. 
The wish to speak to the want of another mind as- 
sists to clear your own. A certain truth possesses 
us which we in all ways strive to utter. Every 
time we say a thing in conversation, we get a me- 



216 CLUBS. 

chanical advantage in detaching it well and deliv- 
erly. I prize the mechanics of conversation. 'T is 
pulley and lever and screw. To fairly disengage 
the mass, and send it jingling down, a good boul- 
der, — a block of quartz and gold, to be worked up 
at leisure in the useful arts of life, — is a wonder- 
ful relief. 

What are the best days in memory? Those 
in which we met a companion who was truly such. 
How sweet those hours when the day was not long 
enough to communicate and compare our intellect- 
ual jewels, — the favorite passages of each book, 
the proud anecdotes of our heroes, the delicious 
verses we had hoarded ! What a motive had then 
our solitary days ! How the countenance of our 
friend still left some light after he had gone! We 
remember the time when the best gift we could ask 
of fortune was to fall in with a valuable companion 
in a ship's cabin, or on a long journey in the old 
stage-coach, where, each passenger being forced to 
know every other, and other employments being 
out of question, conversation naturally flowed, peo- 
ple became rapidly acquainted, and, if well adapted, 
more intimate in a day than if they had been 
neighbors for years. 

In youth, in the fury of curiosity and acquisition, 
the day is too short for books and the crowd of 
thoughts, and we are impatient of interruption. 



CLUBS. 217 

Later, when books tire, thought has a more languid 
flow ; and the days come when we are alarmed, and 
say there are no thoughts. ' What a barren- witted 
pate is mine ! ' the student says ; ' I will go and 
learn whether I have lost my reason.' He seeks 
intelligent persons, whether more wise or less wise 
than he, who give him provocation, and at once and 
easily the old motion begins in his brain : thoughts, 
fancies, humors flow ; the cloud lifts ; the horizon 
broadens; and the infinite opulence of things is 
again shown him. But the right conditions must 
be observed. Mainly he must have leave to be 
himself. Sancho Panza blessed the man who 
invented sleep. So I prize the good invention 
whereby everybody is provided with somebody who 
is glad to see him. 

If men are less when together than they are \ 
alone, they are also in some respects enlarged. 
They kindle each other ; and such is the power of 
suggestion that each sprightly story calls out more ; 
and sometimes a fact that had long slept in the 
recesses of memory hears the voice, is welcomed to 
daylight, and proves of rare value. Every meta- 
physician must have observed, not only that no 
thought is alone, but that thoughts commonly go in 
pairs; though the related thoughts first appeared 
in his mind at long distances of time. Things are 
in pairs : a natural fact has only half its value imtil 



218 CLUBS. 

a fact in moral nature, its counterpart, is stated. 
Then they confirm and adorn each other ; a story- 
is matched by another story. And that may be 
the reason why, when a gentleman has told a good 
thing, he immediately tells it again. 

Nothing seems so cheap as the benefit of conver- 
sation ; nothing is more rare. 'T is wonderful how 
you are balked and baffled. There is plenty of in- 
telligence, reading, curiosity; but serious, happy 
discourse, avoiding personalities, dealing with re- 
sults, is rare : and I seldom meet with a reading \ 
and thoughtful person but he tells me, as if it were / 
his exceptional mishap, that he has no companion. J 

Suppose such a one to go out explormg dilferent 
circles in search of this wise and genial counter- 
part, — he might inquire far and wide. Conversa- 
tion in society is found to be on a platform so low—^ 
as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet. 
Amidst all the gay banter, sentiment cannot pro- 
fane itself and venture out. The reply of old Isoc- 
rates comes so often to mind, — " The things which 
are now seasonable I cannot say ; and for the things 
which I can say it is not now the time." Besides, 
who can resist the charm of talent ? The lover of 
letters loves power too. Among the men of wit 
and learning, he could not withhold his homage 
from the gayety, grasp of memory, luck, splendor, 
and speed ; such exploits of discourse, such feats of 



CLUBS. 219 

society ! What new powers, what mines of wealth ! 
But when he came home, his brave sequins were 
dry leaves. He found either that the fact they 
had thus dizened and adorned was of no value, or 
that he already knew all and more than all they had 
told him. He could not find that he was helped by 
so much as one thought or principle, one solid fact, ( 
one commanding impulse : great was the dazzle, J 
but the gain was small. He uses his occasions; 
he seeks the company of those who have convivial 
talent. But the moment they meet, to be sure 
they begin to be something else than they were ; 
they play pranks, dance jigs, run on each other, 
pun, tell stories, try many fantastic tricks, under 
some superstition that there must be excitement 
and elevation; — and they kill conversation at 
once. I know well the rusticity of the shy hermit. 
No doubt he does not make allowance enough for 
men of more active blood and habit. But it is 
only on natural ground that conversation can be 
rich. It must not begin with uproar and violence. 
Let it keep the ground, let it feel the connection 
with the battery. Men must not be off their "^ 
centres. 

— -Some men love only to talk where they are mas- 
ters. They like to go to school-girls, or to boys, or 
into the shops where the sauntering people gladly 
lend an ear to any one. On th«se terms they give 



220 CLUBS. 

information and please themselves by sallies and 
cliat which are admired by the idlers ; and the 
talker is at his ease and jolly, for he can walk out 
without ceremony when he pleases. They go rarely 
to their equals, and then as for their own con- 
venience simply, making too much haste to intro- 
duce and impart their new whim or discovery; 
listen badly or do not listen to the comment or to 
the thought by which the company strive to repay 
them ; rather, as soon as their own speech is done, 
they take their hats. Then there are the gladia- \ 
tors, to whom it is always a battle ; 't is no matter \ 
on which side, they fight for victory; then the '| 
heady men, the egotists, the monotones, the steriles, J 
and the impracticables. 

It does not help that you find as good or a better 
man than yourself, if he is not timed and fitted to 
you. The greatest sufferers are often those who a^ 
have the most to say, — men of a delicate sympa- 
thy, who are dumb in mixed company. Able peo- / 
pie, if they do not know how to make allowance for J 
them, paralyze them. One of those conceited prigs 
who value nature only as it feeds and exhibits them 
is equally a pest with the roysterers. There must 
be large reception as well as giving. How delight- 
ful after these disturbers is the radiant, playful wit 
of — one whom I need not name, — for in every 
society there is his representative. Good-nature is 



CLUBS. 221 

stronger than tomahawks. His conversation is all 
pictures : he can reproduce whatever he has seen ; 
he tells the best story in the county, and is of such 
genial temper that he disposes all others irresistibly 
to good-humor and discourse. Diderot said of the 
Abbe Galiani : " He was a treasure in rainy days : 
and if the cabinet-makers made such things, every- 
body would have one in the country." 

One lesson we learn early, — that in spite of 
seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. 
We readily assume this with our mates, and are 
disappointed and angry if we find that we are pre- 
mature, and that their watches are slower than 
ours. In fact the only sin which we never forgive 
in each other is difference of opinion. We know 
beforehand that yonder man must think as we do. 
Has he not two hands, — two feet, — hair and nails? 
Does he not eat, — bleed, — laugh, -^ cry ? His 
dissent from me is the veriest affectation. This 
conclusion is at once the logic of persecution and 
of love. And the ground of our indignation is our 
conviction that his dissent is some wilfulness he 
practises on himself. He checks the flow of his 
opinion, as the cross cow holds up her milk. Yes, 
and we look into his eye, and see that he knows it 
and hides his eye from ours. ^ 

But to come a little nearer to my mark, I am to 
say that there may easily be obstacles in the way 



222 CLUBS. 

of finding tlie pure article we are in search of, but 
wlien we find it it is worth the pursuit, for beside 
its comfort as medicine and cordial, once in the 
right company, new and vast values do not fail to 
appear. All that man can do for man is to be 
found in that market. There are great prizes in 
this game. Our fortunes in the world are as our 
mental equipment for this competition is. Yonder 
is a man who can answer the questions which I 
cannot. Is it so ? Hence comes to me boundless 
curiosity to know his experiences and his wit. 
Hence competition for the stakes dearest to man. 
What is a match at whist, or draughts, or billiards, 
or chess, to a match of mother-wit, of knowledge, 
and of resources? However courteously we con- 
ceal it, it is social rank and spiritual power that 
are compared ; whether in the parlor, the courts, 
the caucus, the senate, or the chamber of science, 
— which are only less or larger theatres for this 
competition. 

He that can define, he that can answer a ques- 
tion so as to admit of no further answer, is the 
best man. This was the meaning of the story of 
the Sphinx. In the old time conundrums were sent 
from king to king by ambassadors. The seven wise 
masters at Periander's banquet spent their time in 
answering them. The life of Socrates is a pro- 
pounding and a solution of these. So, in the hagi- 



CLUBS. 223 

ology of each nation, the lawgiver was in each case 
some man of eloquent tongue, whose sympathy- 
brought him face to face with the extremes of soci- 
ety. Jesus, Menu, the first Buddhist, Mahomet, 
Zertusht, Pythagoras, are examples. 

Jesus spent his life in discoursing with humble 
peoj)le on life and duty, in giving wise answers, 
showing that he saw at a larger angle of vision, 
and at least silencing those who were not generous 
enough to accept his thoughts. Luther spent his 
life so ; and it is not his theologic works, — his 
" Commentary on the Galatians," and the rest, but 
his " Table-Talk," w^hich is still read by men. Dr. 
Johnson 'was a man of no profound mind, — full 
of English limitations, English politics, English 
Church, Oxford philosophy ; yet, having a large 
heart, mother-wit, and good sense which impatiently 
overleaped his customary bounds, his conversation 
as reported by Boswell has a lasting charm. Con- 
versation is the vent of character as well as of 
thought ; and Dr. Johnson impresses his company, 
not only by the point of the remark, but also, when 
the point fails, because he makes it. His obvious 
relig'ion or superstition, his deep wish that they 
should think so or so, weighs with them, — so rare 
is depth of feeling, or a constitutional value for a 
thought or opinion, among the light-minded men 
and women who make u^ society ; and though they 



224 CLUBS. 

know that there is in the speaker a degree of short- 
coming, of insincerity, and of talking for victory, 
yet the existence of character, and habitual rever- 
ence for principles over talent or learning, is felt 
by the frivolous. 

One of the best records of the great German 
master who towered over all his contemporaries in 
the first thirty years of this century, is his con- 
versations as recorded by Eckermann ; and the 
" Table-Talk " of Coleridge is one of the best re- 
mains of his genius. 

In the Norse legends, the gods of Valhalla, when 
they meet the Jotuns, converse on the perilous 
terms that he who cannot answer the other's ques- 
tions forfeits his own life. Odin comes to the 
threshold of the Jotun Waftrhudnir in disguise, 
calling himself Gangrader ; is invited into the hall, 
and told that he cannot go out thence unless he 
can answer every question Wafthrudnir shall put. 
Wafthrudnir asks him the name of the god of the 
sun, and of the god who brings the night ; what 
river separates the dwellings of the sons of the 
giants from those of the gods ; what plain lies be- 
tween the gods and Surtur, their adversary, etc. ; 
all which the disguised Odin answers satisfactorily. 
Then it is his turn to interrogate, and he is an- 
swered well for a time by the Jotun. At last he 
puts a question which none but himself could an- 



CLUBS. 225 

swer : " What did Odin whisper in the ear of his 
son Balder, when Balder mounted the funeral 
pile ? " The startled giant replies : " None of the 
gods knows what in the old time thou saidst in 
the ear of thy son : with death on my mouth have 
I spoken the fate-words of the generation of the 
iEsir ; with Odin contended I in wise words. Thou 
must ever the wisest be." 

And still the gods and giants are so known, and 
still they play the same game in all the million 
mansions of heaven and of earth ; at all tables, 
clubs, and tete - a - tetts^ the lawyers in the court- 
house, the senators in the capitol, the doctors in the 
academy, the wits in the hotel. Best is he who 
gives an answer that cannot be answered again. 
Omnis definitio periculosa est, and only wit has 
the secret. The same thing took place when Leib- 
nitz came to visit Newton ; when Schiller came to 
Goethe ; when France, in the person of Madame 
de Stael visited Goethe and Schiller ; when Hegel 
was the guest of Victor Cousin in Paris; when 
Linnaeus was the guest of Jussieu. It happened 
many years ago that an American chemist carried 
a letter of introduction to Dr. Dalton of Manches- 
ter, England, the author of the theory of atomic 
proportions, and was coolly enough received by the 
Doctor in the laboratory where he was engaged. 
Only Dr. Dalton scratched a formida on a scrap 

VOL. VII. 15 



226 CLUBS. 

of paper and pushed it towards the guest, — " Had 
lie seen that ? " The visitor scratched on another 
paper a formula describing some results of his own 
with sulphuric acid, and pushed it across the table, 
— " Had he seen that ? " The attention of the 
English chemist was instantly arrested, and they 
became rapidly acquainted. 

To answer a question so as to admit of no reply, 
is the test of a man, — to touch bottom every time. 
Hyde, Earl of Rochester, asked Lord-Keeper Guil- 
ford, " Do you not think I could understand any 
business in England in a month?" "Yes, my 
lord," replied the other, " but I think you would 
understand it better in two months." When Ed- 
ward I. claimed to be acknowledged by the Scotch 
(1292) as lord paramount, the nobles of Scotland 
replied, " No answer can be made while the throne 
is vacant." When Henry III. (1217) plead du- 
ress against his people demanding confirmation and 
execution of the Charter, the reply was : " If this 
were admitted, civil wars could never close but by 
the extirpation of one of the contending parties." 

What can you do with one of these sharp respon- 
dents ? What can you do with an eloquent man ? 
No rules of debate, no contempt of court, no exclu- 
sions, no gag-laws can be contrived that his first 
syllable will not set aside or overstep and annul. 
You can shut out the light, it may be, but can you 



CLUBS. 227 

shut out gravitation ? You may condemn his book, 
but can you fight against his thought ? That is 
always too nimble for you, anticipates you, and 
breaks out victorious in some other quarter. Can 
you stop the motions of good sense ? What can 
you do with Beaumarchais, who converts the censor 
whom the court has appointed to stifle his play into 
an ardent advocate ? The court appoints another 
censor, who shall crush it this time. Beaumarchais 
persuades him to defend it. The court successively 
appoints three more severe inquisitors ; Beaumar- 
chais converts them all into triumphant vindicators 
of the play which is to bring in the Revolution. 
Who can stop the mouth of Luther, — of Newton ? 
— of Franklin, — of Mirabeau, — of Talleyrand ? 

These masters can make good their own place, 
and need no patron. Every variety of gift — sci- 
ence, religion, politics, letters, art, prudence, war, 
or love — has its vent and exchange in conversa- 
tion. Conversation is the Olympic games whither 
every superior gift resorts to assert and approve 
itself, — and, of course, the inspirations of power- 
ful and public men, with the rest. But it is not 
this class, whom the splendor of their accomplish- 
ment almost inevitably guides into the vortex of 
ambition, makes them chancellors and commanders 
of council and of action, and makes them at last 
fatalists, — not these whom we now consider. We 



228 CLUBS. 

consider those who are interested in thoughts, their 
own and other men's, and who delight in comparing 
them; who think it the highest compliment they 
can pay a man to deal with him as an intellect, to 
expose to him the grand and cheerful secrets per- 
haps never opened to their daily companions, to 
share with him the sphere of freedom and the sim- 
plicity of truth. -^ 

But the best conversation is rare. Society seems 

/to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and 
realities as fictions ; and the simple lover of truth, 
especially if on very high grounds, as a religious 
or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and 
alien. 

/ It is possible that the best conversation is be- \ 
tween two persons who can talk only to each other. ( 
Even Montesquieu confessed that in conversation, ; 
if he perceived he was listened to by a third 
person, it seemed to him from that moment the i 
whole question vanished from his mind. I have 
known persons of rare ability who were heavy com- 
pany to good social men who knew well enough 
how to draw out others of retiring habit; and, 
moreover, were heavy to intellectual men who ought 
to have known them. And does it never occur 
that we perhaps live with people too superior to be 
seen, — as there are musical notes too high for the 
scale of most ears ? There are mfen who are great 



CLUBS. 229 

only to one or two companions of more opportunity, 
or more adapted. 

It was to meet these wants that in all civil na- 
tions attempts have been made to organize conver- 
sation by bringing together cultivated people under 
the most favorable conditions. 'Tis certain there 
was liberal and refined conversation in the Greek, 
in the Roman, and in the Middle Age. There was 
a time when in France a revolution occurred in 
domestic architecture ; when the houses of the no- 
bility, which, up to that time, had been constructed 
on feudal necessities, in a hollow square, — the 
ground-floor being resigned to offices and stables, 
and the floors above to rooms of state and to lodg- 
ing-rooms, — were rebuilt with new purpose. It was 
the Marchioness of Rambouillet who first got the 
horses out of and the scholars into the palaces, 
having constructed her hStel with a view to society, 
with superb suites of drawing-rooms on the same 
floor, and broke through the morgue of etiquette 
by inviting to her house men of wit and learning 
as well as men of rank, and piqued the emulation 
of Cardinal Richelieu to rival assemblies, and so 
to the founding of the French Academy. The his- 
tory of the H6tel Rambouillet and its brilliant cir- 
cles makes an important date in French civiliza- 
tion. And a history of clubs from early antiquity, 
tracing the efforts to secure liberal and refined con- 



230 CLUBS. 

versation, throngli the Greek and Eoman to the 
Middle Age, and thence down through French, 
English, and German memoirs, tracing the clubs 
and coteries in each country, would be an impor- 
tant chapter in history. We know well the Mer- 
maid Club, in London, of Shakspeare, Ben Jon- 
son, Chapman, Herrick, Selden, Beaumont and 
Fletcher ; its " Rules " are preserved, and many 
allusions to their suppers are found in Jon son, 
Herrick, and in Aubrey. Anthony Wood has 
many details of Harrington's Club. Dr. Bentley's 
Club held Newton, Wren, Evelyn, and Locke ; and 
we owe to Boswell our knowledge of the club of 
Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Gibbon, Reynolds, 
Garrick, Beauclerk and Percy. And we have rec- 
ords of the brilliant society that Edinburgh boasted 
in the first decade of this century. Such societies 
are possible only in great cities, and are the com- 
pensation which these can make to their dwellers 
for depriving them of the free intercourse with 
Nature. Every scholar is surrounded by wiser 
men than he — if they cannot write as well. Can- 
not they meet and exchange results to their mutual 
benefit and delight ? It was a pathetic experience 
when a genial and accomplished person said to me, 
looking from his country home to the capital of 
New England, " There is a town of two hundred 
thousand people, and not a chair in it for me." If 



CLUBS. 231 

he were sure to find at No. 2000 Tremont Street 
what scholars were abroad after the morning stud- 
ies were ended, Boston would shine as the New 
Jerusalem to his eyes. 

Now this want of adapted society is mutual. 
The man of thought, the man of letters, the man 
of science, the administrator skilful in affairs, the 
man of manners and culture, whom you so much 
wish to find, — each of these is wishing to be found. 
Each wishes to open his thought, his knowledge, 
his social skill to the daylight in your company and 
affection, and to exchange his gifts for yours ; and 
the first hint of a select and intelligent company is 
welcome. 

But the club must be self-protecting, and ob- 
stacles arise at the outset. There are people who 
cannot well be cultivated ; whom you must keep 
down and quiet if you can. There are those who 
have the instinct of a bat to fly against any lighted 
candle and put it out, — marplots and contradictors. 
There are those who go only to talk, and those who 
go only to hear : both are bad. A right rule for 
a club would be, — Admit no man whose presence 
excludes any one topic. It requires people who are 
not surprised and shocked, who do and let do and \ 
let be, who sink trifles and know solid values, and ( 
who take a great deal for granted. 

It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to 



232 CLUBS, 

regulate tlie laws of election so as to exclude per- 
emptorily every social nu isance. Nobody wishes 
bad manners. We must have loyalty and character. 
The poet Marvell was wont to say that he " would 
not drink wine with any one with whom he could 
not trust his life." But neither can we afford to be 
superfine. A man of irreproachable behavior and 
excellent sense preferred on his travels taking his 
chance at a hotel for company, to the charging 
himself with too many select letters of introduction. 
He confessed he liked low company. He said the 
fact was incontestable that the society of gypsies 
was more attractive than that of bishops. The girl 
deserts the parlor for the kitchen ; the boy, for the 
wharf. Tutors and parents cannot interest him like 
the uproarious conversation he finds in the market 
or the dock. I knew a scholar, of some experience 
in camps, who said that he liked, in a bar-room, to 
tell a few coon stories and put himself on a good 
footing with the company ; then he could be as 
silent as he chose. A scholar does not wish to be-'"^ 
always pumping his brains ; he wants gossips. The 
black-coats are good company only for black-coats ; 
but when the manufacturers, merchants, and ship- 
masters meet, see how much they have to say, and 
how long the conversation lasts ! They have come 
from many zones ; they have traversed wide coun- 
tries ; they know each his own arts, and the cunning 



CLUBS. 233 

artisans of his craft ; they have seen the best and 
the worst of men. Their knowledge contradicts 
the popular opinion and your own on many points. 
Things which you fancy wrong they know to be 
right and profitable ; things which you reckon 
superstitious they know to be true. They have 
found virtue in the strangest homes ; and in the 
rich store of their adventures are instances and 
examples which you have been seeking in vain for 
years, and which they suddenly and unwittingly 
offer you. 

I remember a social experiment in this direc- 
tion, wherein it appeared that each of the members 
fancied he was in need of society, but himself un- 
presentable. On trial they all found that they 
could be tolerated by, and could tolerate, each 
other. Nay, the tendency to extreme self-respect 
which hesitated to join in a club was running rap- 
idly down to abject admiration of each other, when 
the club was broken up by new combinations. 

The use of the hospitality of the club hardly 
needs explanation. Men are unbent and social at 
table ; and I remember it was explained to me, in 
a Southern city, that it was impossible to set any 
public charity on foot unless through a tavern din- 
ner. I do not think our metropolitan charities 
would plead the same necessity ; but to a club met 
for conversation a supper is a good basis, as it dis- 



234 CLUBS. 

arms all parties and puts pedantry and business to 
the door. All are in good humor and at leisure, 
which are the first conditions of discourse ; the or- 
dinary reserves are thrown off, experienced men 
meet with the freedom of boys, and, sooner or later, 
impart all that is singular in their experience. 

The hospitalities of clubs are easily exaggerated. 
No doubt the suppers of wits and philosophers ac- 
quire much lustre by time and renown. Plutarch, 
Xenophon, and Plato, who have celebrated each a 
banquet of their set, have given us next to no data 
of the viands ; and it is to be believed that an in- 
different tavern dinner in such society was more 
relished by the convives than a much better one in 
worse company. Herrick's verses to Ben Jonson 
no doubt paint the fact : — 

*' When we such clusters had 
As made us nobly wild, not mad; 
And yet, each verse of thine 
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine." 

Such friends make the feast satisfying ; and I notice 
that it was when things went prosperously, and the 
company was full of honor, at the banquet of the 
Cid, that " the guests all were joyful, and agreed 
in one thing, — that they had not eaten better for 
three years." 

I need only hint the value of the club for bring- 
ing masters in their several arts to compare and ex- 



CLUBS. 235 

panel their views, to come to a*n understanding on 
these points, and so that their united opinion shall 
have its just influence on public questions of edu- 
cation and politics. It is agreed that in the sec- 
tions of the British Association more information is 
mutually and effectually communicated, in a few 
hours, than in many months of ordinary corre- 
spondence and the printing and transmission of 
ponderous reports. We know that Vhomme de 
lettres is a little wary, and not fond of giving away 
his seed-corn; but there is an infallible way to 
draw him out, namely, by having as good as he. If 
you have Tuscaroora and he Canada, he may ex- 
chano'e kernel for kernel. If his discretion is in- 
curable, and he dare not speak of fairy gold, he 
will yet tell what new books he has found, what old 
ones recovered, what men write and read abroad. 
A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the 
club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner 
with mutual advantage. 

Every man brings into society some partial 
thought and local culture. We need range and 
alternation of topics and variety of minds. One 
likes in a companion a phlegm which it is a tri- 
umph to disturb, and, not less, to make in an old 
acquaintance unexpected discoveries of scope and 
power through the advantage of an inspiring sub- 
ject. Wisdom is like electricity. There is no per- 



236 CLUBS. 

manently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, 
who, being put into certain company, or other 
favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, 
as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while. 
But while we look complacently at these obvious 
pleasures and values of good companions, I do not 
forget that Nature is always very much in earnest, 
and that her great gifts have something serious and 
stern. When we look for the highest benefits of 
conversation, the Spartan rule of one to one is 
usually enforced. Discourse, when it rises highest 
and searches deepest, when it lifts us into that 
mood out of which thoughts come that remain as 
stars in our firmament, is between two. 



J 



COURAGE. 



COUEAGE. 



I OBSERVE that there are three qualities which 
conspicuously attract the wonder and reverence of 
mankind : — 

— 1. Disinterestedness, as shown in indifference to 
the ordinary bribes and influences of conduct, — a 
purpose so sincere and generous that it cannot be 
tempted aside by any prospects of wealth or other 
private advantage. SeK-love is, in almost all men, 

£!i^LEL2I§I^^y-§^sJi.tJ^l^^* t^^^y ^^'® incredulous of a 
man's habitual preference of the general good to 
his own ; but when they see it proved by sacrifices 
of ease, wealth, rank, and .of life itself, there is 
no limit to their admiration. This has made tl 
power of the saints of the East and West, who 
have led the religion of great nations. Self-sacrifice 
is the real miracle out of which all the reported 
miracles grew. This makes the renown of the he- 
roes of Greece andT Rome, — of Socrates, Aristides, 
and Phocion ; of Quintus Curtius, Cato, and Reg- 
ulus ; of Hatem Tai's hospitality ; of Chatham, 
whose scornful magnanimity gave him immense 



240 COURAGE. 

popularity ; of Wasliington, giving his service to 
the public without salary or reward. 

2. Practic^jDowei^ Men admire the man who 
can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and 
wood and steel and brass, — the man who can build 
the boat, who has the impiety to make the rivers 
run the way he wants them ; who can lead his tele- 
graph through the ocean from shore to shore ; who, 
sitting in his closet, can lay out the plans of a cam- 
paign, sea-war and land-war, such that the best 
generals and admirals, when all is done, see that 
they must thank him for success ; the power of bet- 
ter combination and foresight, however exhibited, 
whether it only plays a game of chess, or whether, 
more loftily, a cunning mathematician, penetrating 
the cubic weights of stars, predicts the planet which 
eyes had never seen; or whether, exploring the 
chemical elements whereof we and the world are 
made, and seeing their secret, Franklin draws off 
the lightning in his hand ; suggesting that one day 
a wiser geology shall make the earthquake harm- 
less and the volcano an agricultural resource. Or 
here is one who, seeing the wishes of men, knows 
how to come at their end ; whispers to this friend, 
argues down that adversary, moulds society to his 
purpose, and looks at all men as wax for his hands ; 
takes command of them as the wind does of clouds, 
as the mother does of the child, or the man that 



COURAGE. 241 

knows more does of the man that knows less, and 
leads them in glad surprise to the very point where 
they would be : this man is followed with acclama- 
tion. 

3. The third excellence is courao:e,_ the perfect 
wiU, which no terrors can shake, which is attracted 
by frowns or threats or hostile armies, nay, needs 
these to awake and fan its reserved energies into a 
pure flame, and is never quite itself until the haz- 
ard is extreme ; then it is serene and fertile, and 
all its powers play well. There is a Hercules, an 
Achilles, a Rustem, an Arthur or a Cid in the 
mythology of every nation ; and in authentic his- 
tory, a Leonidas, a Scijiio, a Caesar, a Richard 
CcEur de Lion, a Cromwell, a Nelson, a Great 
Conde, a Bertrand du Guesclin, a Doge Dandolo, a 
Napoleon, a Massena, and Ney. 'T is said courage 
is common, but the immense esteem in which it is 
held proves it to be rare. Animal resistance, the 
instinct of the male animal when cornered, is no 
doubt common ; but the pure article, courage with 
eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the 
cannon's mouth, cheerfulness in lonely adherence 
to_the right, is the endowment of elevated charac- 
ters. I need not show how much it is esteemed, 
for the people give it the first rank. They forgive 
everything to it. What an ado we make through 
two thousand years about Thermopylae and Sala- 

voL. vn. 16 



242 COURAGE, 

mis ! What a memory of Poitiers and Crecy, and 
Bunker Hill, and Washington's endurance ! And 
any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which 
is esteemed becomes the darling of all men. The 
very nursery-books, the ballads which delight boys, 
the romances which delight men, the favorite top- 
ics of eloquence, the thunderous emphasis which 
orators give to every martial defiance and passage 
of arms, and which the people greet, may testify. 
How short a time since this whole nation rose every 
morning to read or to hear the traits of courage of 
its sons and brothers in the field, and was never 
weary of the theme ! We have had examples of 
men who, for showing effective courage on a single 
occasion, have become a favorite spectacle to na- 
tions, and must be brought in chariots to every 
mass meeting. 

Men are so charmed with valor that they have 
pleased themselves with being called lions, leop- 
ards, eagles, and dragons, from the animals contem- 
porary with us in the geologic formations. But 
the animals have great advantage of us in precoc- 
ity. Touch the snapping-turtle with a stick, and 
he seizes it with his teeth. Cut off his head, and 
the teeth will not let go the stick. Break the egg 
of the young, and the little embryo, before yet the 
eyes are open, bites fiercely ; these vivacious crea- 
tures contriving, — shall we say ? — not only to 



COURAGE, 243 

bite after they are dead, but also to bite before 
they are born. 

But man begins life helpless. The babe is in 
paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it 
alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self- 
protection that mothers say the salvation of the life 
and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle. 
j The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and 
/ add to his loveliness ; for his utter ignorance and 
weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such 
a small basis of capital compel every by-stander to 
^take his part. Every moment as long as he is 
awake he studies the use of his eyes, ears, hands, 
and feet, learning how to meet and avoid his dan- 
gers, and thus every hour loses one terror more. 
But this education stops too soon. A large major- 
ity of men being bred in families and beginning 
early to be occupied day by day with some routine 
of safe industry, never come to the rough experi- 
ences that make the Indian, the soldier, or the 
frontiersman self-subsistent and fearless. Hence 
the high price of courage indicates the general ti- 
midity. "Mankind," said Franklin, "are das- 
tardly when they meet with opposition." In war 
even generals are seldom found eager to give bat- 
tle. Lord Wellington said, " Uniforms were often 
masks ; " and again, " When my journal appears, 
many statues must come down." The Norse Sagas 



244 COURAGE. 

relate that when Bishop Magne reproved King 
Sigurd for his wicked divorce, the priest who at- 
tended the bishop, expecting every moment when 
the savage king would burst with rage and slay his 
superior, said that he " saw the sky no bigger than 
a calf -skin." And I remember when a pair of 
Irish girls who had been run away with in a wagon 
by a skittish horse, said that when he began to 
rear, they were so frightened that they could not 
see the horse. 

■^ Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not 
/ larger than a calf -skin ; shuts the eyes so that we 
/ cannot see the horse that is running away with us ; 
j worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the 
V heart. Fear is cruel and mean. The political 
reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and 
malignity, — a total perversion of opinion ; society 
is upside down, and its best men are thought too 
bad to live. Then the protection which a house, a 
family, neighborhood and property, even the first 
accumulation of savings gives, go in all times to 
generate this taint of the respectable classes. 
Those political parties which gather-in the well-dis- 
posed portion of the community, — how infirm and 
ignoble I what white lips they have ! always on the 
defensive, as if the lead were intrusted to the jour- 
nals, often written in great part by women and 
boys, who, without strength, wish to keep up the ap- 



COURAGE. 245 

pearance of strength. They can do the hurras, the 
placarding, the flags, — and the voting, if it is a 
fair day ; but the aggressive attitude of men who 
will have right done, will no longer be bothered 
with burglars and ruffians in the streets, counter- 
feiters in public offices, and thieves on the bench ; 
that part, the part of the leader and soul of the 
vigilance committee, must be taken by stout and 
sincere men who are really angry and determined. 
In ordinary, we have a snappish criticism which 
watches and contradicts the opposite party. We 
want the will which advances and dictates. When 
we get an advantage, as in Congress the other day, 
it is because our adversary has committed a fault, 
not that we have taken the initiative and given the 
law. Nature has made up her mind that what can- 
not defend itself shall not be defended. Complain- 
ing never so loud and with never so much reason is 
of no use. One heard much cant of peace-par- 
ties long ago in Kansas and elsewhere, that their 
strength lay in the greatness of their wrongs, and 
dissuading all resistance, as if to make this strength 
greater. But were their wrongs greater than the 
negro's? And what kind of strength did they 
ever give him? It was always invitation to the 
tyrant, and bred disgust in those who would pro- 
tect the victim. What cannot stand must fall ; and 
the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the 



246 COURAGE. 

respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth 
we will hazard in the defence of our right. An 
old farmer, my neighbor across the fence, when I 
ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says : 
" No ; 't is no use balloting, for it will not stay ; but 
what you do with the gun will stay so." Nature 
has charged every one with his own defence as with 
his own support, and the only title I can have to 
your help is when I have manfully put forth all the 
means I possess to keep me, and being overborne 
by odds, the by-standers have a natural wish to in- 
terfere and see fair play. 

But with this pacific education we have no readi- 
ness for bad times. I am much mistaken if every 
man who went to the army in the late war had not 
a lively curiosity to know how he should behave in 
action. Tender, amiable boys, who had never en- 
countered any rougher play than a base-ball match 
or a fishing excursion, were suddenly drawn up to 
face a bayonet charge or capture a battery. Of 
course they must each go into that action with a 
certain despair. Each whispers to himself : " My 
exertions must be of small account to the result; 
only will the benignant Heaven save me from dis- 
gracing myself and my friends and my State. Die ! 
O yes, I can well die ; but I cannot afford to mis- 
behave ; and I do not know how I shall feel." So 
great a soldier as the old French Marshal Montluc 



COURAGE 247 

acknowledges that he has often trembled with fear, 
and recovered conrage when he had said a prayer 
for the occasion. I knew a young soldier who 
died in the early campaign, who confided to his 
sister that he had made up his mind to volunteer 
for the war. " I have not," he said, " any proper 
courage, but I shall never let any one find it out." 
And he had accustomed himself always to go into 
whatever place of danger, and do whatever he was 
afraid to do, setting a dogged resolution to resist 
this natural infirmity. Coleridge has preserved 
an anecdote of an officer in the British Navy who 
told him that when he, in his first boat expedition, 
a midshipman in his fourteenth year, accompanied 
Sir Alexander Ball, " as we were rowing up to the 
vessel we were to attack, amid a discharge of mus- 
ketry, I was overpowered with fear, my knees shook 
and I was ready to faint away. Lieutenant Ball 
seeing me, placed himself close beside me, took hold 
of my hand and whispered, ' Courage, my dear boy ! 
you will recover in a minute or so ; I was just the 
same when I first went out in this way.' It was as 
if an angel spoke to me. From that moment I was 
as fearless and as forward as the oldest of the 
boat's crew. But I dare not think what would 
have become of me, if, at that moment, he had 
scoffed and exposed me." 

Knowledge is the antidote to fear, — Knowledge, 



248 COURAGE. 

Use, and Reason, with its higher aids. The child 
is as much in danger from a staircase, or the fire- 
grate, or a bath-tub, or a cat, as the soldier from a 
cannon or an ambush. Each surmounts the fear 
as fast as he precisely understands the peril and 
learns the means of resistance. Each is liable to 
panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance 
surrendered to the imagination. Knowledge is the 
encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the 
heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in 
practice. \They can conquer who believe they can^ j , 
It is he who has done the deed once who does not ' 
shrink from attempting it again. It is the groom 
who knows the jumping horse well who can safely 
ride him. It is the veteran soldier, who, seeing the 
flash of the cannon, can step aside from the path of 
the ball. Use makes a better soldier than the mosfr^"^^ 
urgent considerations of duty, — familiarity with 
danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He 
sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with 
imagination ; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, 
that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight 
in lead. 

The sailor loses fear as fast as he acquires com- 
mand of sails and spars and steam ; the frontiers- 
man, when he has a perfect rifle and has acquired 
a sure aim. To the sailor's experience every new 
circumstance suggests what he must do. The ter- 



COURAGE. 249 

rific chances which make the hours and the minutes 
long to the passenger, he whiles away by incessant 
application of expedients and repairs. To him a 
leak, a hurricane, or a water-spout is so much work, 
— no more. The hunter is not alarmed by bears, 
catamounts, or wolves, nor the grazier by his bull, 
nor the dog-breeder by his bloodhound, nor an Arab 
by the simoon, nor a farmer by a fire in the woods. 
The forest on fire looks discouraging enough to a 
citizen : the farmer is skilful to fight it. The 
neighbors run together ; with pine boughs they can 
mop out the flame, and by raking with the hoe a 
long but little trench, confine to a patch the fire 
which would easily spread over a hundred acres. 

In short, courage consists in equality to the prob- 
lem before us. The school-boy is daunted before 
his tutor by a question of arithmetic, because he 
does not yet command the simple steps of the solu- 
tion which the boy beside him has mastered. These 
once seen, he is as cool as Archimedes, and cheerily 
proceeds a step farther. Courage is equality to the 
problem, in affairs, in science, in trade, in council, 
or in action ; consists in the conviction that the 
agents with whom you contend are not superior in 
strength of resources or spirit to you. The general 
must stimulate the mind of his soldiers to the per- 
ception that they are men, and the enemy is no 
more. Knowledge, yes ; for the danger of dangers 



250 COURAGE. 

is illusion. The eye is easily daunted ; and the 
drums, flags, shining helmets, beard, and moustache 
of the soldier have conquered you long before his 
sword or bayonet reaches you. 

But we do not exhaust the subject in the slight 
analysis ; we must not forget the variety of tem- 
peraments, each of which qualifies this power of re- 
sistance. It is observed that men with little imagi- 
nation are less fearful ; they wait till they feel pain, 
whilst others of more sensibility anticipate it, and 
suffer in the fear of the pang more acutely than in 
the pang. 'T is certain that the threat is sometimes 
more formidable than the stroke, and 't is possible 
that the beholders suffer more keenly than the vic- 
tims. Bodily pain is superficial, seated usually in 
the skin and the extremities, for the sake of giving 
us warning to put us on our guard ; not in the 
vitals, where the rupture that produces death is 
perhaps not felt, and the victim never knew what 
hurt him. Pain is superficial, and therefore fear 
is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most 
keenly felt by the by-standers. The torments are 
illusory. The first suffering is the last suffering, 
the later hurts being lost on insensibility. Our af- 
fections and wishes for the external welfare of the 
hero tumultuously rush to expression in tears and 
outcries ; but we, like him, subside into indifferency 
and defiance when we perceive how short is the 
longest arm of malice, how serene is the sufferer. 



COURAGE. 251 

It is plain that there is no separate essence called 
courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in 
the heart containing drops or atoms that make or 
give this virtue ; but it is the right or healthy state 
of every man, when he is free to do that which is 
constitutional to him to do. It is directness, — the 
instant performing of that which he ought. The 
thoughtful man says, You differ from me in opinion 
and methods, but do you not see that I cannot think 
or act otherwise than I do ? that my way of living 
is organic ? And to be really strong we must 
adhere to our own means. On organic action all 
strength depends. Hear what women say of doing 
a task by sheer force of will : it costs them a fit of 
sickness. Plutarch relates that the Pythoness who 
tried to prophesy without command in the Temple 
at Delphi, though she performed the usual rites, 
and inhaled the air of the cavern standing on the 
tripod, fell into convulsions and died. Undoubtedly 
there is a temperamental courage, a warlike blood, 
which loves a fight, does not feel itself except in a 
quarrel, as one sees in wasps, or ants, or cocks, or 
cats. The like vein appears in certain races of men 
and in individuals of every race. In every school 
there are certain fighting boys ; in every society, the 
contradicting men ; in every town, bravoes and 
bullies, better or worse dressed, fancy-men, patrons 
of the cock-pit and the ring. Courage is temper- 



252 COURAGE. ' 

amental, scientific, ideal. Swedenborg has left this 
record of his king : " Charles XII. of Sweden did 
not know what that was which others called fear, nor 
what that spurious valor and daring that is excited 
by inebriating draughts, for he never tasted any- 
liquid but pure water. Of him we may say that 
he led a life more remote from death, and in fact 
lived more, than any other man." It was told of 
the Prince of Conde that " there not being a more 
furious man in the world, danger in fight never dis- 
turbs him more than just to make him civil, and to 
command in words of great obligation to his officers 
and men, and without any the least disturbance to 
his judgment or spirit." Each has his own courage, 
as his own talent ; but the courage of the tiger is 
one, and of the horse another. The dog that scorns 
to fight, will fight for his master. The llama that 
will carry a load if you caress him, will refuse food 
and die if he is scourged. The fury of onset is onCj'X 
and of calm endurance another. There is a courage ^ 
of the cabinet as well as a courage of the field ; a 
courage of manners in private assemblies, and an; 
other in public assemblies ; a courage which enables 
one man to speak masterly to a hostile company, 
whilst another man who can easily face a cannon's 
mouth dares not open his own. 
^ There is a courage of a merchant in dealing with 
his trade, by which dangerous turns of affairs are 



COURAGE. 253 

met and prevailed over. Merchants recognize as 
much gallantry, well judged too, in the conduct 
of a wise and upright man of business in difficult 
times, as soldiers in a soldier. 

-There is a courage in the treatment of every art 

by a master in architecture, in sculpture, in paint- 
ing, or in poetry, each cheering the mind of the 
spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius, 
which yet nowise implies the presence of physical 
valor in the artist. This is the courage 
in every kind. A certain quantity of power be- 
longs to a certain quantity of faculty. The beau- 
tiful voice at church goes sounding on, and covers 
up in its volume, as in a cloak, all the defects of 
the choir. The singers, I observe, all peld to it, 
and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, and 
dares, and dares, because she knows she can. 

It gives the cutting edge to every profession. 
The judge puts his mind to the tangle of contradic- 
tions in the case, squarely accosts the question, and 
by not being afraid of it, by dealing with it as busi- 
ness which must be disposed of, he sees presently 
that common arithmetic and common methods ap- 
ply to this affair. Perseverance strips it of all 
peculiarity, and ranges it on the same ground as 
other business. Morphy played a daring game in 
chess : the daring was only an illusion of the spec- 
tator, for the player sees his move to be well forti- 



I 



254 COURAGE. 

fied and safe. You may see the same dealing in 
criticism; a new book astonishes for a few days, 
takes itself out of common jurisdiction, and nobody 
knows what to say of it : but the scholar is not de- 
ceived. The old principles which books exist to 
express are more beautiful than any book ; and out 
of love of the reality he is an expert judge how far 
the book has approached it and where it has come 
short. In all applications 't is the same power, — 
the habit of reference to one's own^mindj as the 
home of all truth and counsel, and which can easily 
dispose of any book because it can very well do 
without all books. When a confident man comes 
into a company magnifying this or that author he 
has freshly read, the company grow silent and 
ashamed of their ignorance. But I remember the 
old professor, whose searching mind engraved every 
word he spoke on the memory of the class, when 
we asked if he had read this or that shining nov- 
elty, " No, I have never read that book ; " instantly 
the book lost credit, and was not to be heard of 
again. 

Every creature has a courage of his constitution 
fit for his duties : — Archimedes, the courage of a 
geometer to stick to his diagram, heedless of the 
siege and sack of the city ; and the Roman soldier 
his faculty to strike at Archimedes. Each is strong, ^ 
relying on his own, and each is betrayed when he 
seeks in himself the courage of others. / 



COURAGE, 255 

Captain Jolm Brown, the hero of Kansas, said 
to me in conversation, that " for a settler in a new- 
country, one good, believing, strong-minded man is 
worth a hmidred, nay, a thousand men without 
character ; and that the right men will give a per- 
manent direction to the fortunes of a state. As 
for the bullying drunkards of which armies are 
usually made up, he thought cholera, small-pox, 
and consumption as valuable recruits." He held 
the belief that courage and chastity are silent con- 
cerning themselves. He said, " As soon as I hear 
one of my men say, ' Ah, let me only get my eye 
on such a man, I '11 bring him down,' I don't expect 
much aid in the fight from that talker. 'T is the 
quiet, peaceable men, the men of principle, that 
make the best soldiers." 

" 'T is still observed those men most valiant are 
Who are most modest ere they came to war." 

True courage is not ostentatious ; men who wish 
to inspire terror seem thereby to confess themselves 
cowards. Why do they rely on it, but because 
they know how potent it is with themselves ? 
^^ The true temper has genial influences. It makes 
a bond of union between enemies. Governor Wise 
of Virginia, in the record of his first interviews 
with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage; If 
Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as 



256 COURAGE. 

he is a superior man, he distinguishes John Brown. 
As they confer, they understand each other swiftly ; 
each respects the other. If opportunity allowed, 
they would prefer each other's society and desert 
their former companions. Enemies would become 
affectionate. Hector and Achilles, Eichard and 
Saladin, Wellington and Soult, General Daumas 
and Abdel Kader, become aware that they are 
nearer and more alike than any other two, and, if 
their nation and circumstance did not keep them 
apart, would run into each other's arms. 

See too what good contagion belongs to it. Ev- 
erywhere it finds its own with magnetic affinity. 
Courage of the soldier awakes the courage of wo- 
man. Florence Nightingale brings lint and the 
blessing of her shadow. Heroic women offer them- 
selves as nurses of the brave veteran. The troop 
of Virginian infantry that had marched to guard 
the prison of John Brown ask leave to pay their 
respects to the prisoner. Poetry and eloquence 
catch the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown be- 
fore. Everything feels the new breath except the 
old doting nigh-dead politicians, whose heart the 
trumpet of resurrection could not wake. 

The charm of the best courages is that they are 
inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius. The hero 
coidd not have done the feat at another hour, in a 
lower mood. The best act of the marvellous genius 



COURAGE.' 257 

of Greece was its first act ; not in the statue or the 
Parthenon, but in the instinct which, at Thermop- 
ylge, held Asia at bay, kept Asia out of Europe, — 
Asia ^\dth its antiquities and organic slavery, — 
from corrupting the hope and new morning of the 
West. The statue, the architecture, were the later 
and inferior creation of the same genius. In view 
of this moment of history, we recognize a certain 
prophetic instinct, better than wisdom. Napoleon 
said well, " My hand is immediately connected with 
my head ; " but the sacred courage is connected 
with the heart. The head is a half, a fraction, 
until it is enlarged and inspired by the moral sen- 
timent. For it is not the means on which we draw, 
as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous 
talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but 
the aims only. The aim reacts back on the means. 
A great aim aggrandizes the means. The meal 
and water that are the commissariat of the, forlorn 
lio][)e that stake their lives to defend the pass are 
sacred as the Holy Grail, or as if one had eyes to 
see in chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed the 
sun. 

There is a persuasion in the soul of man that 
he is here for cause, that he was put down in this 
place by the Creator to do the work for which he 
inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all 
antagonists that could combine against him. The 

VOL. VII. 17 



258 COURAGE. 

pious Mrs. Hutchinson says of. some passages in 
the defence of Nottingham against the Cavaliers, 
" It was a great instruction that the best and high- 
est courages are beams of the Almighty." And 
whenever the religious sentiment is adequately af- 
firmed, it must be with dazzling courage. As long 
as it is cowardly insinuated, as with the wish to 
succor some partial and temporary interest, or to 
make it affirm some pragmatical tenet which our 
parish church receives to-day, it is not imparted, 
and cannot inspire or create. For it is always new, 
leads and surprises, and practice never comes up 
with it. There are ever appearing in the world 
men who, almost as soon as they are born, take a 
bee-line to the rack of the inquisitor, the axe of 
the tyrant, like Giordano Bruno, Yanini, Huss, 
Paul, Jesus, and Socrates. Look at Fox's Lives 
of the Martyrs, Sewel's History of the Quakers, 
Southey's Book of the Church, at the folios of the 
Brothers BoUandi, who collected the lives of twen- 
ty-five thousand martyrs, confessors, ascetics, and 
self-tormentors. There is much of fable, but a 
broad basis of fact. The tender skin does not 
shrink from bayonets, the timid woman is not 
scared by fagots ; the rack is not frightful, nor the 
rope ignominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Par- 
sons, at the stake, tied straw on his head when the 
fire approached him, and said, " This is God's hat." 



COURAGE. 259 

Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea 
better than all things in the world ; that he is aim- 
ing neither at pelf or comfort, but will venture^ 
all to put in act the invisible thought in his mind. 
He is everywhere a liberator, but of a freedom that 
is ideal ; not seeking to have land or money or 
conveniences, but to have no other limitation than 
that which his own constitution imj)oses. He is 
free to speak truth ; he is not free to lie. He 
wishes to break every yoke all over the world 
which hinders his brother from acting after his 
thought. -N 

There are degrees of courage, and each step up- 
ward makes us acquainted with a higher virtue. 
"^Let us say then frankly that ^e education of the 
will is the object of our existence. Poverty, the 
prison, the rack, the fire, the hatred and execra- 
tions of our fellow-men, appear trials beyond the 
endurance of common humanity ; but to the hero 
whose intellect is aggrandized by the soul, and so 
measures these penalties against tlie good which 
his thought surveys, these terrors vanish as dark- 
ness at sunrise. 

We have little right in piping times of peace to 
pronounce on these rare heights of character ; but 
there is no assurance of security. In the most pri- 
vate life, difficult duty is never far off. Therefore 
we must think with courage. Scholars and think- 



260 ' COURAGE. 

ers are prone to an effeminate habit, and shrink 
if a coarser shout comes up from the street, or a 
brutal act is recorded in the journals. The Med- 
ical College piles up in its museum its grim mon- 
sters of morbid anatomy, and there are melancholy 
sceptics with a taste for carrion who batten on 
the hideous facts in history, — persecutions, inqui- 
sitions, St. Bartholomew massacres, devilish lives, 
Nero, Caesar, Borgia, Marat, Lopez ; men in whom 
every ray of humanity was extinguished, parricides, 
matricides, and whatever moral monsters. These 
are not cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a 
healthy mind ; they require of us a patience as ro- 
bust as the energy that attacks us, and an unrest- 
ing exploration of final causes. Wolf, snake, and 
crocodile are not inharmonious in nature, but are 
made useful as checks, scavengers, and pioneers ; 
and we must have a scope as large as Nature's to 
deal with beast like men, detect what scullion func- 
tion is assigned them, and foresee in the secular 
melioration of the planet how these will become 
unnecessary and will die out. 

He has not learned the lesson of life who does 
not every day surmount a fear. I do not wish to 
put myself or any man into a theatrical position, 
or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade. 
Have the courage not to adopt another's courage. 
There is scope and cause and resistance enough for 



COURAGE. 261 

us in our proper work and circumstance. And 
there is no creed of an honest man, be he Chris- 
tian, Turk, or Gentoo, which does not equally 
preach it. If you have no faith in beneficent 
power above you, but see only an adamantine fate 
coiling its folds about nature and man, then reflect 
that the best use of fate is to teach us courage, if 
only because baseness cannot change the appointed 
event. If you accept your thoughts as inspirations 
from the Supreme Intelligence, obey them when 
they prescribe difficult duties, because they come 
only so long as they are used ; or, if your scepti- 
cism reaches to the last verge, and you have no 
confidence in any foreign mind, then be brave, be- 
cause there is one good opinion which must always 
be of consequence to you, namely, your own. 



I am permitted to enrich my chapter by adding 
an anecdote of pure courage from real life, as nar- 
rated in a ballad by a lady to whom all the partic- 
ulars of the fact are exactly known. 

GEORGE NIDIVER. 

Men have done brave deeds, 

And bards have sung them well: 

I of good George Nidiver 
Now the tale will tell. 



262 COURAGE. 

In Californian mountains 
A hunter bold was he : 

Keen his eye and sure his aim 
As any you should see. 

A little Indian boy 

Followed him everywhere, 

Eager to share the hunter's joy, 
The hmiter's meal to share. 

And when the bird or deer 
Fell by the hunter's skill, 

The boy was always near 
To help with right good-will. 

One day as through the cleft 
Between two mountains steep, 

Shut in both right and left, 
Their questing way they keep, 

They see two grizzly bears 
With hunger fierce and fell 

Rush at them unawares 

Right down the narrow dell. 

The boy turned round with screams, 
And ran with terror wild ; 

One of the pair of savage beasts 
Pursued the shrieking cliild. 

The hunter raised his gun, — 
He knew one charge was all, — 

And through the boy's pursuing foe 
He sent his only ball. 



COURAGE. 263 

The other on George Nidiver 

Came on Avith dreadful pace: 
The hunter stood unarmed, 

And met him face to face. 

I say unarmed he stood. 

Against those frightful paws 
The rifle butt, or club of wood, 

Could stand no more than straws. 

George Nidiver stood still 

And looked him in the face ; 
The wild beast stopped amazei, 

Then came with slackening pace. 

Still firm the hunter stood. 

Although his heart beat high ; 
Again the creature stopped, 

And gazed with wondermg eye. 

The hmiter met his gaze, 

Nor yet an inch gave way; 
The bear turned slowly round, 

And slowly moved away. 

What thoughts were in his mind 

It would be hard to spell : 
What thoughts were in George Nidiver 

I rather guess than tell. 

But sure that rifle's aim. 

Swift choice of generous part, 
Showed in its passing gleam 

The depths of a brave heart. 



SUCCESS. 



SUCCESS. 



Our American people cannot be taxed with 
slowness in performance or in praising their per- 
formance. The earth is shaken by our engineries. 
We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. 
We have the power of territory and of sea-coast, 
and know the use of these. We count our cen- 
sus, we read our growing valuations, we survey 
our map, which becomes old in a year or two. Our 
eyes run approvingly air)ng the lengthened lines of 
railroad and telegraph. We have gone nearest to 
the Pole. We have discovered the Antartic conti- 
nent. We interfere in Central and South America, 
at Canton, and in Japan ; we are adding to an al- 
ready enormous territory. Our political constitu- 
tion is the hope of the world, and we value our- 
selves on all these feats. 

'Tis the way of the world; 'tis the law of 
youth, and of unfolding strength. Men are made 
each with some triumphant superiority, which, 
through some adaptation of fingers or ear or eye 
ttt::3e^jJbfidifig=ze£i:^ggilis|i!& or musical or literary 



268 SUCCESS. 

craft, enriches tlie community with a new art ; and 
not only we, but all men of European stock, value 
these certificates. Giotto could draw a perfect cir- 
cle : Erwin of Stoinbach could build a minster ; 
Olaf, king of Norway, could run round his galley 
on the blades of the oars of the rowers when the 
ship was in motion ; Ojeda could run out swiftly 
on a plank projected from the top of a tower, turn 
round swiftly and come back ; Evelyn writes from 
Rome : " Bernini, the Florentine sculptor, architect, \ 
painter and poet, a little before my coming to ^ 
Rome, gave a public opera, wherein he painted the / 
scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, com- / 
posed the music, writ the comedy and built the/ 
theatre." 

"There is nothing in war" said Napoleon, 
" which I cannot do by my own hands. If there is 
nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture it. 
The gun-carriages I know how to construct. If it 
is necessary to make cannons at the forge, I can 
make them. The details of working them in bat- 
tle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. 
In administration, it is I alone who have arranged 
the finances, as you know." 

It is recorded of Linnaeus, among many proofs of 
his beneficent skill, that when the timber in the 
ship-yards of Sweden was ruined by rot, Linnaeus 
was desired by the government to find a remedy. 



SUCCESS. 269 

He studied the insects that infested the timber, and 
found that they laid their eggs in the logs within 
certain days in April, and he directed that during 
ten days at that season the logs should be immersed 
under water in the docks ; which being done, the 
timber was found to be uninjured. 

Columbus at Yeragua found plenty of gold ; but 
leaving the coast, the ship full of one hundred and 
fifty skilful seamen, — some of them old pilots, and 
with too much experience of their craft and treach- 
ery to him, — the wise admiral kept his private 
record of his homeward path. And when he 
reached Spain he told the King and Queen that 
" they may ask all the pilots who came with him 
where is Veragua. Let them answer and say if 
they know where Yeragua lies. I assert that they 
can give no other account than that they went to 
lands where there was abundance of gold, but they 
do not know the way to return thither, but would 
be obliged to go on a voyage of discovery as much 
as if they had never been there before. There is a 
mode of reckoning," he proudly adds, "derived 
from astronomy, which is sure and safe to any one 
\.]yj understands it." 

Hippocrates in Greece knew how to stay the de- 
^ curing plague which ravaged Athens in his time, 
and his skill died with him. Dr. Benjamin Rush, 
in Philadelphia, carried that city heroically through 



270 SUCCESS. 

the yellow fever of the year 1793. Leverrier car- 
ried the Copernican system m his head, and knew 
where to look for the new planet. We have seen 
an Aniericaji woman write a novel of which a mill- 
ion copies were sold, in all languages, and which 
had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, 
and was read with equal interest to three audiences, 
namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the 
nursery of every house. We have seen women who 
could institute hospitals and schools in armies. We 
have seen a woman who by pure song could melt 
the souls of whole populations. And there is no 
limit to these varieties of talent. ,/ » 

These are arts to be thankful for, — each one as 
it is a new direction of human power. We cannot 
choose but respect them. Our civilization is made 
up of a million contributions of this kind. For suc- 
cess, to be sure we esteem it a test in other people, 
since we do first in ourselves. We respect our-, 
selves more if we have succeeded. Neither do we 
grudge to each of these benefactors the ]'ralse or 
the profit which accrues from his industry. 

Here are already quite different degree ;f moral 
merit in these examples. I don't know but we and 
our race elsewhere set a higher value on wealth, 
victory, and coarse superiority of all kinds, than 
other men, — have less tranquillity of mind, are less 
easily contented. The Saxon is taught from his in- 



SUCCESS. 271 

fancy to wish to be first. The Norseman was a rest- 
less rider, fighter, freebooter. The ancient Norse 
ballads describe him as afflicted with this inextin- 
guishable thirst of victory. The mother says to her 
son : — 

" Success shall be iii thy courser tall, 
Success in thyself, which is best of all. 
Success in thy hand, success in thy foot, 
In struggle with man, in battle with brute : — 
The holy God and Saint Drothin dear 
Shall never shut eyes on thy career ; 

Look out, look out, Svend Vonved ! " 

These feats that we extol do not signify so much 
as we say. These boasted arts are of very recent 
origin. They are local conveniences, but do not 
really add to our stature. The greatest men of the 
world have managed not to want them. Newton 
was a great man, without telegraph, or gas, or 
'steam-coach, or rubber shoes, or lucifer-matches, or 
ether for his pain ; so was Shakspeare, and Alfred, 
and Scipio, and Socrates. These are local conven- 
iences, but how easy to go now to parts of the world 
where not only all these arts are wanting, but where 
they are despised. The Arabian sheiks, the most 
dignified people in the planet, do not want them ; 
yet have as much self-respect as the English, and 
are easily able to impress the Frenchman or the 
American who visits them with the respect due to 
a brave and sufficient man. 



272 - SUCCESS. 

These feats have to be sure great difference of 
merit, and some of them involve power of a high 
kiiid. But the public values the invention more 
than the inventor does. The inventor knows there 
is much more and better where this came from. 
The public sees in it a lucrative secret. Men see 
the reward which the inventor enjoys, and they 
think, ' How shall we win that ? ' Cause and effect 
are a " little tedious ; how to leap to the result by 
short or by false means ? We are not scrupulous. 
What we ask is victory, without regard to the cause ; 
after the Eob Eoy rule, after the Napoleon rule, to 
be the strongest to-day,^- the way of the Talley- 
rands, prudent people, whose watches go faster 
than their neighbors', and who detect the first mo- 
ment of decline and throw themselves on the instant 
on the winning side. I have heard that Nelson 
used to say, "Never mind the justice or the impu- 
dence, only let me succeed." Lord Brougham's sin- 
gle duty of coui^sel is, " to get the prisoner clear." 
Fuller says 't is a maxim of lawyers that "a crown 
once worn cleareth all defects of the wearer thereof." 
Iiie?i ne reussit mieux que le succes. And we 
Americans are tainted with this insanity, as our 
bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. 
We are great by exclusion, grasping, and egotism. 
Our success takes from all what it gives to one. 
'Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for 
luck. 



SUCCESS. 273 

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momen- 
tary strength and concentration to men, and seems 
to be much used in nature for fabrics in which local 
and spasmodic energy is required. I could point to 
men in this country, of indispensable importance to 
the carrying on of American life, of this humor, 
whom we coidd ill spare ; any one of them would be 
a national loss. But it spoils conversation. They 
will not try conclusions with you. They are ever 
thrusting this pampered self between you and them. 
It is plain they have a long education to undergo 
to reach simplicity and plain - dealing, which are 
what a wise man mainly cares for in his companion. 
Nature knows how to convert evil to good ; Nature 
utilizes misers, fanatics, show-men, egotists, to ac- 
complish her ends ; but we must not think better 
of the foible for that. The passion for sudden 
success is rude and puerile, just as war, cannons, 
and executions are used to clear the ground of bad, 
lumpish, irreclaimable savages, but always to the 
damage of the conquerors. 

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to 
get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on 
midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind 
by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery 
without apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through 
pretending that they sell, or power through making 
believe you are powerful, or through a packed jury 

VOL. VII. 18 



274 SUCCESS. 

or caucus, bribery and "repeating" votes, or wealth 
by fraud. They think they have got it, but they 
have got something else, — a crime which calls for 
another crime, and another devil behind that ; these 
are steps to suicide, infamy, and the harming of 
mankind. We countenance each other in this life 
of show, puffing advertisement, and manufacture 
of public opinion ; and excellence is lost sight of 
in the hunger for sudden performance and praise. 

There was a wise man, an Italian artist, Michel 
Angelo, who writes thus of himself : " Meanwhile 
the Cardinal Ij^polito, in whom all my best hopes 
were placed, being dead, I began to understand that 
the promises of this world are for the most part 
vain phantoms, and that to confide in one's self, and 
become something of worth and value, is the best 
and safest course." Now, though I am by no 
means sure that the reader will assent to all my 
propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first 
rule for success, — that we shall drop the brag and 
the advertisement, and take Michel Angelo' s course, 
" to confide in one's self, and be something of worth 
and value." 

Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do 
your work. I have to say this often, but nature 
says it oftener. 'Tis clownish to insist on doing 
all with one's own hands, as if every man should 
build his own clumsy house, forge his hammer, and 



SUCCESS. 275 

bake liis dough ; but he is to dare to do what he 
can do best ; not help others as they would direct 
him, but as he knows his helpful power to be. To 
do otherwise is to neutralize all those extraordinary- 
special talents distributed among men. Yet whilst 
this seK-truth is essential to the exhibition of the 
world and to the growth and glory of each mind, it 
is rare to find a man who believes his own thought 
or who speaks that which he was created to say. As 
nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense 
and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any 
man than an act of his own. Any work looks wonT 
derful to him, except that which he can do. We do 
not believe our own thought ; we must serve some- 
body; we must quote somebody ; we dote on the old 
and the distant ; we are tickled by great names ; we 
import the religion of other nations ; we quote their 
opinions ; we cite their lav/s. The gravest and 
learnedest courts in this country shudder to face a 
new question, and will wait months and years for a 
case to occur that can be tortured into a precedent, 
and thus throw on a bolder party the oiiics of an 
initiative. Thus we do not carry a counsel in our 
breasts, or do not know it; and because we can- 
not shake oif from our shoes this dust of Europe 
and Asia, the world seems to be born old, society 
is under a spell, every man is a borrower and a 
mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation ; 



276 SUCCESS. 

and hence that depression of spirits, that furrow of 
care, said to mark every American brow. 
/ Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief 
that if you are here the authorities of the universe 
put you here, and for cause, or with some task 
strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so 
long as you work at that you are well and success- 
ful. It by no means consists in rushing prema- 
turely to a showy feat that shall catch the eye and 
satisfy spectators. It is enough if you work in the 
right direction. So far from the performance be- 
ing the real success, it is clear that the success was 
much earlier than that, namely, when all the feats 
that make our civility were the thoughts of good 
heads. The fame of each discovery rightly attaches 
to the mind that made the formula which contains 
all the details, and not to the manufacturers who 
now make their gain by it ; although the mob uni- 
formly cheers the publisher, and not the inventor. 
It is the dulness of the multitude that they cannot 
see the house in the ground-plan ; the working, in 
the model of the projector. Whilst it is a thought, 
though it were a new fuel, or a new food, or the 
creation of agriculture, it is cried down, it is a chi- 
mera ; but when it is a fact, and comes in the shape 
of eight per cent, ten per cent, a hundred per cent, 
they cry, ' It is the voice of God.' Horatio Green-"^ 
ough the sculptor said to me of Robert Fulton's 



SUCCESS. 277 

visit to Paris : " Fulton knocked at the door of Na- 
poleon with steam, and was rejected ; and Napoleon 
lived long enough to know that he had excluded a 
greater power than his own.''^^' 
,| Is there no loving of knowledge, and of art, and 
of our design, for itself alone ? Cannot we please 
ourselves with performing our work, or gaining 
truth and power, without being praised for it ? I 
gain my point, I gain all points, if I can reach my 
companion with any statement which teaches him 
his own worth^ The sum of wisdom is, that the 
time is never Tost that is devoted to workj The 
good workman never says, ' There, that will do ; ' 
but, ' There, that is it : try it, and come again, it will 
last always.' If the artist, in whatever art, is well 
at work on his own design, it signifies little that he 
does not yet find orders or customers. I pronounce 
that young man happy who is content with having 
acquired the skill which he had aimed at, and waits 
willingly when the occasion of making it appreci- 
ated shall arrive, knowing well that it will not loi- 
ter. The time your rival spends in dressing up his 
work for effect, hastily, and for the market, you 
spend in study and experiments towards real knowl- 
edge and efficiency. He has thereby sold his pic- 
ture or machine, or won the prize, or got the ap- 
pointment ; but you have raised yourself into a 
higher school of art, and a few years will show the 



278 SUCCESS. 

advantage of the real master over the short popu- 
larity of the showmaD. I know it is a nice point 
to discriminate this self -trust, which is the pledge 
of all mental vigor and performance, from the dis- 
ease to which it is allied, — the exaggeration of the 
part which we can play ; — yet they are two things. 
But it is sanity to know that, over my talent or 
knack, and a million times better than any talent, 
is the central intelligence which subordinates and 
uses all talents ; and it is only as a door into this, 
that any talent or the knowledge it gives is of 
value. He only who comes into this central intel- 
ligence, in which no egotism or exaggeration can 
be, comes into self-possession. 

My next point is that in the scale of powers it 
is not talent but sensibility which is best : talent 
confines, but the central life puts us in relation to 
all. How often it seems the chief good to be born 
with a cheerful temper and well adjusted to the 
tone of the human race. Such a man feels himself 
in harmony, and conscious by his receptivity of an 
infinite strength. Like Alfred, " good fortune ac- 
companies him like a gift of God." Feel yourself, 
and be not daunted by things. 'T is the fulness of 
man that runs over into objects, and makes his 
Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great. The 
joyful reader borrows of his own ideas to fill their 
faulty outline, and knows not that he borrows and 
gives. 



SUCCESS. 279 

There is something of poverty in our criticism. 
We assume that there are few great men, all the 
rest are little ; that there is but one Homer, but 
one Shakspeare, one Newton, one Socrates. But 
the soul in her beaming hour does not acknowledge 
these usurpations. We should know how to praise 
Socrates, or Plato, or Saint John, without impov- 
erishing us. In good hours we do not find Shak- 
speare or Homer over -great, only to have been 
translators of the happy present, and every man 
and woman divine possibilities. 'Tis the good 
reader that makes the good book ; a good head can- 
not read amiss, in every book he finds passages 
which seem confidences or asides hidden from all 
else and unmistakably meant for his ear. 

The light by which we see in this world comes 
out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any 
noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and 
houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this 
busy brain are miraculous and illimitable. Therein 
are the rules and formulas by which the whole em- 
pire of matter is worked. There is no prosperity, 
trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any 
kind, but if you trace it home you will (' iCi it rooted 
in a thought of some individual man. 

Is all life a surface affair? 'Tis curious, but 
our difference of wit appears to be only a differ- 
ence of impressionability, or power to appreciate 



280 SUCCESS. 

faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and vis- 
ions. When the scholar or the writer has pumped 
his brain for thoughts and verses, and then comes 
abroad into Nature, has he never found that there 
is a better poetry hinted in a boy's whistle of a 
tune, or in the piping of a sparrow, than in all 
his literary results ? We call it health. What is 
so admirable as the health of youth? — with his 
long days because his eyes are good, and brisk cir- 
culations keep him warm in cold rooms, and he 
loves books that speak to the imagination ; and he 
can read Plato, covered to his chin with a cloak in 
a cold upper chamber, though he should associate 
the Dialogues ever after with a woollen smell. 'T is 
the bane of life that natural effects are continually 
crowded out, and artificial arrangements substi- 
tuted. We remember when in early youth the 
earth spoke and the heavens glowed ; when an 
evening, any evening, grim and wintry, sleet and 
snow, was enough for us ; the houses were in the 
air. Now it costs a rare combination of clouds 
and lights to overcome the common and mean. 
What is it we look for in the landscape, in sunsets 
and sunrises, in the sea and the firmament ? what 
but a compensation for the cramp and pettiness of 
human performances? We bask in the day, and 
the mind finds somewhat as great as itself. In Na- 
ture all is large massive repose. Kemember what 



SUCCESS. 281 

befalls a city boy who goes for the first time into 
the October woods. He is suddenly initiated into 
a pomp and glory that brings to pass for him the 
dreams of romance. He is the king he dreamed 
he was ; he walks through tents of gold, through 
bowers of crimson, porphyry and topaz, pavilion 
on pavilion, garlanded with vines, flowers and sun- 
beams, with incense and music, with so many hints 
to his astonished senses ; the leaves twinkle and 
pique and flatter him, and his eye and step are 
tempted on by what hazy distances to happier soli- 
tudes. All this happiness he owes only to his finer 
perception. The owner of the wood-lot finds only 
a number of discolored trees, and says, ' They 
ought to come down ; they are n't growing any bet- 
ter ; they should be cut and corded before spring.' 
Wordsworth writes of the delights of the boy in 
Nature : — 

" For never will come back the hour 
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower." 

But I have just seen a man, well knowing what he 
spoke of, who told me that the verse was not true 
for him; that his eyes opened as he grew older, 
and that every spring was more beautiful to him 
than the last. 

V We live among gods of our own creation, i Does 
that deep-toned bell, which has shortened many a 
night of ill nerves, render to you nothing but acous- 



/ 



282 SUCCESS. 

tic vibrations ? Is the old cliurch which gave you 
the first lessons of religious life, or the village 
school, or the college where you first knew the 
dreams of fancy and joys of thought, only boards 
or brick and mortar ? Is the house in which 30U 
were born, or the house in which your dearest 
friend lived, only a piece of real estate ^dniasi^^Ee 
iSrfiai^estd-by the--iIfaifoi'd insina You walk 

on the beach and enjoy the animation of the pic- 
ture. Scoop up a little water in the hollow of your 
palm, take up a handful of shore sand ; well, these 
are the elements. What is the beach but acres of 
sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? 
a little more or less signifies nothing. No, it is 
that this brute matter is part of somewhat not 
brute. It is that the sand floor is held by spheral 
gravity, and bent to be a part of the round globe, 
under the optical sky, — part of the astonishing as- 
tronomy, and existing at last to moral ends and 
from moral causes. 

The world is not made up to the eye of figures, 
that is, only half ; it is also made of color. How 
that element washes the universe with its enchant- 
ing waves ! The sculptor had ended his work, and 
behold a new world of dream-like glory. 'T is the 
last stroke of Nature ; beyond color she cannot go. 
In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge 
only, but of love also. If thought is form, senti- 



SUCCESS. 283 

ment is color. It clothes the skeleton world with 
space, variety, and glow. The hues of sunset make 
life great ; so the affections make some little web 
of cottage and fireside populous, important, and 
filling the main space in our history. 

The fundamental fact in our metaphysic consti- 
tution is the correspondence of man to the world, 
so that every change in that writes a record in the 
mind. The mind yields sympathetically to the 
tendencies or law which stream through things and 
make the order of nature; and in the j)erfection 
of this correspondence or expressiveness, the health 
and force of man consist. If we follow this hint 
into our intellectual education, we shall find that it 
is not propositions, not new dogmas and a logical 
exposition of the world that are our first need ; 
but to watch and tenderly cherish the intellectual 
and moral sensibilities, those fountains of right 
thought, and woo them to stay and make their 
home with us. Whilst they abide with us we shall 
not think amiss. Our perception far outruns our 
talent. We bring a welcome to the highest lessons 
of religion and of poetry out of all proportion be- 
yond our skill to teach. And, further, the great 
hearing and sympathy of men is more true and 
wise than their speaking is wont to be. A deep 
sympathy is what we require for any student of the 
mind ; for the chief difference between man and 



284 SUCCESS. 

man is a difference of impressionability. Aristotle 
or Bacon or Kant propound some maxim which is 
the key-note of philosophy thenceforward. But I 
am more interested to know that when at last they 
have hurled out their grand word, it is only some 
familiar experience of every man in the street. If 
it be not, it will never be heard of again. 

Ah ! if one could keep this sensibility, and live 
in the happy sufficing present, and find the day 
and its cheap means contenting, which only ask 
receptivity in you, and no strained exertion and 
cankering ambition, overstimulating to be at the 
head of your class and the head of society, and 
to have distinction and laurels and consumption! 
We are not strong by our power to penetrate, but 
by our relatedness. The world is enlarged for us, 
not by new objects, but by finding more affinities 
and potencies in those we have. 
^ This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty 
which exalts the faculties of youth ; in the power 
which form and color exert upon the soul ; when 
we see eyes that are a compliment to the human 
race, features that explain the Phidian sculpture. 
Fontenelle said : " There are three things about 
which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of 
them, — music, poetry, and love." The great doc- 
tors of this science are the greatest men, — Dante, 
Petrarch, Michel Angolo and Shakspeare. The 



SUCCESS. 285 

wise Socrates treats tKis matter with a certain 
archness, yet with very marked expressions. "I 
am always," he says, " asserting that I happen to 
know, I may say, nothing but a mere trifle relating 
to matters of love ; yet in that kind of learning I 
lay claim to being more skilled than any one man 
of the past or present time." They may well speak 
in this uncertain manner of their knowledge, and 
in this confident manner of their will, for the secret 
of it is hard to detect, so deep it is ; and yet genius 
is measured by its skill in this science. 

Who is he in youth or in maturity or even in 
old age, who does not like to hear of those sensi- 
bilities which turn curled heads round at church, 
and send wonderful eye-beams across assemblies, 
from one to one, never missing in the thickest 
crowd? The keen statist reckons by tens and 
hundreds ; the genial man is interested in every 
slipper that comes into the assembly. The passion, 
alike everywhere, CD^eeps under the snows of Scan- 
dinavia, under the fires of the equator, and swims 
in the seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puissant a 
divinity in the Norse Edda as Camadeva in the 
red vault of India, Eros in the Greek, or Cupid in 
the Latin heaven. And what is specially true of 
love is that it is a state of extreme impressionabil- 
ity ; the lover has more senses and finer senses than 
others; his eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads 



286 SUCCESS. 

omens on the flower, and cloud, and face, and form, 
and gesture, and reads them aright. In his sur- 
prise at the sudden and entire understanding that 
is between him and the beloved person, it occurs 
to him that they might somehow meet indepen- 
dently of time and place. How delicious the belief 
that he could elude all guards, precautions, cere- 
monies, means, and delays, and hold instant and 
sempiternal communication! In solitude, in ban- 
ishment, the hope returned, and the experiment 
was eagerly tried. The supernal powers seem to 
take his part. What was on his lips to say is 
uttered by his friend. When he went abroad, he 
met, by wonderful casualties, the one person he 
sought. If in his walk he chanced to look back, 
his friend was walking behind him. And it has 
happened that the artist has often drawn in his 
pictures the face of the future wife whom he had 
not yet seen. 

But also in complacencies nowise so strict as this 
of the passion, the man of sensibility counts it a 
delight only to hear a child's voice fully addressed 
to him, or to see the beautiful manners of the 
youth of either sex. When the event is past and 
remote, how insignificant the greatest compared 
with the j)iquancy of the present ! To-day at the 
school examination the professor interrogates Syl- 
vina in the history class about Odoacer and Alaric. 



SUCCESS. 287 . 

Sylvina can't remember, but suggests that Odoa- 
cer was defeated ; and the professor tartly replies, 
" No, he defeated the Romans." But 't is plain to 
the visitor that 'tis of no importance at all about 
Odoacer and 'tis a great deal of importance about 
Sylvina, and if she says he was defeated, why he 
had better a great deal have been defeated than 
give her a moment's annoy. Odoacer, if there was 
a particle of the gentleman in him, would have 
said, Let me be defeated a thousand times. 

And as our tenderness for youth and beauty 
gives a new and just importance to their fresh and 
manifold claims, so the like sensibility gives wel- 
come to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for 
merit in corners. An Englishman of marked char- 
acter and talent, who had brought with him hither 
one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured 
me that nobody and nothing of possible interest 
was left in England, — he had brought all that was 
alive away. I was forced to reply : " No, next door 
to you probably, on the other side of the partition 
in the same house, was a greater man than any you 
had seen." " Every man has a history worth know- 
ing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from 
him^) Character and wit have their own magnet- 
ism. Send a deep man into any town, and he will 
find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to 
his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life, 



288 SUCCESS. 

— to add to our liigh acquaintances. The very 
law of averages might have assured you that there 
will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good 
heads. Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. 
'Tis a secret, the genesis of either; but the springs 
of justice and courage do not fail any more than 
salt or sulphur springs. 

The world is always opulent, the oracles are 
never silent; but the receiver must by a happy 
temperance be brought to that top of condition, 
that frolic health, that he can easily take and give 
these fine communications. Health is the condition 
of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, — an open 
and noble temper. There was never poet who had 
not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, 
Pons Capdueil, wrote, — 

" Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true, 
Whom man delights in, God delights in too." 

All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of health, 
prosperity, and the favor of God. Everything 
lasting and fit for men the Divine Power has 
marked with this stamp. What delights, what 
emancipates, not what scares and pains us is wise 
and good in speech and in the arts. For, truly, the 
heart at the centre of the universe with every throb 
hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein, 
and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated 



SUCCESS. 289 

with the tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest 
place is too great : the harvest cannot be gathered. 
Every sound ends in music. The edge of every 
surface is tinged with prismatic rays. 

One more trait of true success. The good mind 
chooses what is positive, what is advancing, — em- 
braces the affirmative. Our system is one of pov- 
erty. 'Tis presumed, as I said, there is but one 
Shakspeare, one Homer, one Jesus, — not that all 
are or shall be inspired. But we must begin by af- 
firming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. 
It is true there is evil and good, night and day : 
but these are not equal. The day is great and 
final. The night is for the day, but the day is not 
for the night. What is tliis immortal demand for 
more, which belongs to our constitution ? this enor- 
mous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar 
as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins 
to content us. We know the satisfactoriness of jus- 
tice, the sufficiency of truth. We know the answer 
that leaves nothing to ask. We know the Spirit 
by its victorious tone. The searching tests to ap- 
ply to every new pretender are amount and qual- 
ity, — what does he add ? and what is the state of 
mind he leaves me in ? Your theory is unimpor- 
tant ; but what new stock you can add to humanity, 
or how high you can carry life ? A man is a man 

only as he makes life and nature happier to us. 
VOL. vn. 19 



290 SUCCESS. 

I fear the popular notion of success stands in di- 
rect opposition in all points to the real and whole- 
some success. One adores public opinion, the other 
private opinion ; one fame, the other desert ; one 
feats, the other humility ; one lucre, the other love ; 
one monopoly, and the other hospitality of mind. 

We may apply this affirmative law to letters, to 
manners, to art, to the decorations of our houses, 
etc. I do not find executions or tortures or lazar- 
houses, or grisly photographs of the field on the day 
after the battle, fit subjects for cabinet pictures. I 
think that some so-called " sacred subjects " must 
be treated with more genius than I have seen in the 
masters of Italian or Spanish art to be right pic- 
tures for houses and churches. Nature does not in- 
vite such exhibition. Nature lays the ground-plan 
of each creature accurately, sternly fit for all his 
functions; then veils it scrupulously. See how 
carefully she covers up the skeleton. The eye shall 
not see it ; the sun shall not shine on it. She 
weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and 
skin and hair and beautiful colors of the day over 
it, and forces death down underground, and makes 
haste to cover it up with leaves and vines, and 
wipes carefully out every trace by new creation. 
Who and what are you that would lay the ghastly 
anatomy bare ? 
[ Don't hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do 



SUCCESS. 291 

not daub with sables and glooms m your conversaX 
tion. Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher.^ 
Don't bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative/ 
propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. S 
Don't waste j^ourself in rejection, nor bark against / 
the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When / 
that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, \ 
the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down/ 
nothing that will not help somebody ; — / 

" For every gift of noble origin v 

Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath." 

The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much 
love, so much perception. As caloric to matter, so 
is love to mind ; so it enlarges, and so it empowers 
it. Good-will makes insight, as one finds his way 
to the sea by embarking on a river. I have seen 
scores of people who can silence me, but I seek one 
who shall make me forget or overcome the frigidi- 
ties and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter 
Giotto, Yasari tells us, renewed pa't because he put 
more goodness into his heads. To awake in man 
and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his feel- 
ing and judgment so that he shall scorn himself 
for a bad action, that is the only aim. 
^ 'Tis cheap and easy to destroy. There is not 
a joyful boy or an innocent girl buoyant with fine 
^ purposes of duty, in all the street full of eager 
and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dis- 



• 



f 



292 SUCCESS. 

/ hearten with a single word. Despondency comes 
( readily enough to the most sanguine. The cynic 
has only to follow their hint with his bitter con- 
firmation, and they check that eager courageous 
pace and go home with heavier step and prema- 
ture age. They will themselves quickly enough 
give the hint he wants to the cold wretch. Which 
of them has not failed to j)lease where they most 
wished it? or blundered where they were most 
ambitious of success ? or found themselves awkward 
or tedious or incapable of study, thought, or hero- 
ism, and only hoped by good sense and fidelity to 
\ do what they could and pass unblamed ? And this 
/ witty malefactor makes their *little hope less with 
satire and scepticism, and slackens the springs of 
, endeavor. Yes, this is easy ; but to help the young 
soul, add energy, inspire hope and blow the coals 
V into a useful flame ; to redeem defeat by new 
J thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the 
'' .. work of divine men. 

"We live on different planes or platforms. There 
is an external life, which is educated at school, 
taught to read, write, cipher, and trade ; taught to 
grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put him- 
self forward, to make himself useful and agreeable 
in the world, to ride, run, argue and contend, un- 
fold his talents, shine, conquer and possess. 

But the inner life sits at home, and does not 



SUCCESS. 293 

learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. 
'Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves truth, be- 
cause it is itself real ; it loves right, it knows noth- 
ing else ; but it makes no progress ; was as wise in 
our first memory of it as now ; is just the same now 
in maturity and hereafter in age, it was in youth. 
We have grown to manhood and womanhood ; we 
have powers, connection, children, reputations, pro- 
fessions : this makes no account of them all. It 
lives in the great present ; it makes the present 
great. This .tranquil, well - founded, wide - seeing 
soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: 
it lies in the sun and broods on the world. A per- 
son of this temper mice said to a man of much ac- 
tivity, " I will pardon you that you do so much, 
and you me that I do nothing." And Euripides 
says that "Zeus hates busybodies and those who ^ 
do too much." 



OLD AGE. 



OLD AGE. 



On the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa So- 
ciety at Cambridge in 1861, the venerable Presi- 
dent Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well 
as senior alumnus of the University, was received 
at the dinner with peculiar demonstrations of re- 
spect. He replied to these compliments in a speech, 
and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary 
society, entered at some length into an Apology for 
Old Age, and, aiding himself by notes in his hand, 
made a sort of running commentary on Cicero's 
chapter " De Senectute." The character of the 
speaker, the transparent good faith of his praise and 
blame, and the naivete of his eager preference of 
Cicero's opinions to King David's, gave unusual in- 
terest to the College festival. It was a discourse 
full of dignity, honoring him who spoke and those 
who heard. 

The speech led me to look over at home — an 
easy task — Cicero's famous essay, charming by its 
uniform rhetorical merit ; heroic with Stoical pre- 
cepts, with a Roman eye to the claims of the State ; 



298 OLD AGE, 

happiest perhaps in his praise of life on the farm ; 
and rising at the conclusion to a lofty strain. But 
he does not exhaust the subject ; rather invites the 
attempt to add traits to the picture from our broader 
modern life. 

Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which 
cling to the element of time, and in which Nature 
delights. Wellington, in speaking of military men, 
said, " What masks are these uniforms to hide 
cowards ! " I have often detected the like decep- 
tion in the cloth shoe, wadded pelisse, wig, spec- 
tacles and padded chair of Age. Nature lends 
herself to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deaf- 
ness, cracked voice, snowy hair, short memory and 
sleep. These also are masks, and all is not Age that 
wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young 
and our mates are yet youths with even boyish re- 
mains, one good fellow in the set prematurely sports 
a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on us 
who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism 
he is, but does deceive his juniors and the public, 
who presently distinguish him with a most amusing 
respect : and this lets us into the secret that the 
venerable forms that so awed our childhood were 
just such imposters. Nature is full of freaks, and 
now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then 
a young heart beating under fourscore winters. 

For if the essence of age is not present, these 



OLD AGE. 299 

signs, whether of Art or Nature, are counterfeit 
and ridiculous : and the essence of age is intellect. 

/Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look 
into the eyes of the youngest person we sometimes 

! discover that here is one who knows already what 
you would go about with much pains to teach him ; 
there is that in him which is the ancestor of all 
around him : which fact the Indian Yedas express 
when they say, " He that can discriminate is tho^ 

i father of his father." And in our old British 
legends of Arthur and the Round Table, his friend 
and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found 
exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though 
an infant of only a few days, speaks articulately to 
those who discover him, tells his name and history, 
and presently foretells the fate of the by-standers. 

r Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be 

^ deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that 

^ babe is a thousand years old. 

^me is indeed the theatre and seat of illu- 
sion : nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind 

/ stretches an hour to a century and dwarfs an age 

X to an hour. Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus 
an old Persian of a hundred and fifty years, who 
was dying, and was saying to himself, "I said, 
coming into the world by birth, ' I will enjoy my- 
self for a few moments.' Alas ! at the variegated 
table of life I partook of a few mouthf uls, and the 



300 OLD AGE. 

Fates said, ' Enough / ' " That which does not 
decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as 
long as one is alone by himself, he is not sensible 
of the inroads of time, which always begin at the 
surf ace - edges. If, on a winter day, you should 
stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the 
afternoon clouds would not indicate whether it were 
June or January ; and if we did not find the reflec- 
tion of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, 
we could not know that the century-clock had 
struck seventy instead of twenty. How many men 
habitually believe that each chance passenger with 
whom they converse is of their own age, and pres- 
ently find it was his father and not his brother 
whom they knew ! 

But not to press too hard on these deceits and 
illusions of Nature, which are inseparable from 
our condition, and looking at age under an aspect 
more conformed to the common-sense, if the ques- 
tion be the felicity of age, I fear the first popular 
judgments will be unfavorable. From the point 
of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and 
markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the 
estimate of age is low, melancholy and sceptical. 
Frankly face the facts, and see the result. To- 
bacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strych- 
nine, are weak dilutions : I the surest poison is time. 
This cup which Nature piits to our lips, has a won- 



OLD AGE. 301 

derf ul virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. 
It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with ex- 
alted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, 
science : especially, it creates a craving for larger 
draughts of itself. But they who take the larger 
draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, 
strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and 
delirium. We postpone our literary work until we 
have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one 
day discover thatl^our literary talent was a youthful 
effervescence which we have now lost. We had a 
judge in Massachusetts who at sixty proposed to 
resign, alleging that he perceived a certain decay 
in his faculties ; he was dissuaded by his friends, 
on account of the public convenience at that time. 
At seventy it was hinted to him that it was time to 
retire ; but he now replied that he thought his 
judgment as robust and all his faculties as good as 
ever they were. But besides the self-deception, the 
strong and hasty laborers of the street do not work 
well with the chronic valetudinarian. [Youth is 
everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires 
/fit surroundings. Age is comely in coaches, in 
/ churches, in chairs of state and ceremony, in coun- 
V cil-chambers, in courts of justice and historical so- 
f cieties. Age is becoming in the country. But in 
"7 the rush and uproar of Broadway, if you look into 
the faces of the passengers there is dejection or in- 



302 OLD AGE. 

/ dignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense 
/ of injury, and the lip made up with a heroic deter- 

! mination not to mind it. Few envy the considera- 
tion enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. Wedo not 
count a man's years, until he has nothing else to 
count. The vast inconvenience of animal immor- 
) tality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, 
the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgrace- 

\ ful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well 

^X enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, 
, and they will all be glad to have us. 
^~~This is odious on the face of it. Universal con- 
victions are not to be shaken by the whimseys of 
overfed butchers and firemen, or by the sentimental 
fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom 
on their cheeks. We know the value of experi- 
ence. Life and art are cumulative ; and he who 
has accomplished something in any department 
alone deserves to be heard on that subject. A man 
of great employments and excellent performance 
used to assure me that he did not think a man 
worth anything until he was sixty ; although this 
smacks a little of the resolution of a certain " Young 
Men's Republican Club," that all men should be 
held eligible who were under seventy. But in all 
governments, the councils of power were held by 
the old ; and patricians or 2^citres^ senate or senes^ 
seigneurs or seniors, gerousia, the senate of 



OLD AGE. 303 

Sparta, the presbytery of the Cliurcli, and the like, 
all signify simply old men. 

The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is 
refuted by the universal prayer for long life, which 
is the verdict of Nature and justified by all history. 
We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated 
pace by which young men achieved grand works ; 
as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, 
Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron ; but these 
are rare exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindi- 
cates her law. f Skill to do comes of doing ; knowl- 
edge comes by eyes always open, and working 
hands; and there is no knowledge that is not 
power. Beranger said, " Almost all the good work- 
men live long." And if the life be true and noble, 
we have quite another sort of seniors than the 
frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely 
old, — namely, the men who fear no city, but by 
whom cities stand ; who appearing in any street, 
the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey 
them: as at "My Cicl, with the fleecy beard," in 
Toledo ; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him ; as 
blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty -four 
years, storming Constantinople at ninety-four, and 
after the revolt again victorious and elected at the 
age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Em- 
pire, which he declined, and died Doge at ninety- 
seven. We still feel the force of Socrates, " whom 



304 OLD AGE. 

well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men ; " 
of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Ro- 
mans by his wit, and himself better than all their 
nation ; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns 
of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry ; of 
Galileo, of whose blindness Castelli said, " The no- 
blest eye is darkened that Nature ever made, — an 
eye that hath seen more than all that went before 
him, and hath opened the eyes of all that shall 
come after him ; " of Newton, who made an impor- 
tant discovery for every one of his eighty-five years ; 
of Bacon, who " took all knowledge to be his prov- 
ince ; " of Fontenelle, " that precious porcelain vase 
laid up in the centre of France to be guarded with 
the utmost care for a hundred years ; " of Frank- 
lin, Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic 
statesmen ; of Washington, the perfect citizen ; of 
Wellington, the perfect soldier ; of Goethe, the 
all-knowing poet ; of Humboldt, the encyclopaedia 
of science. 

Under the general assertion of the well-being of 
age, we can easily count particular benefits of that 
condition. It has weathered the perilous capes 
and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the 
chief evil of life is taken away in removing the 
grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship ex]3ires 
as she enters the harbor at home. It were strange 
if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a 



OLD AGE. 305 

feeling of immense relief from the number of dan- 
gers he has escaped. When the old wife says, 
' Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps 
it is cancerous,' — he replies, ' I am yielding to a 
surer decomposition.' The humorous thief who 
drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the 
froth because he had heard it was unhealthy ; but 
it will not add a pang to the prisoner marched out 
to be shot, to assure him that the pain in his knee 
threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneu- 
monia of the cows raged, the butchers said that 
though the acute degree was novel, there never was a 
time when this disease did not occur among cattle. 
All men carry seeds of all distempers through life 
latent, and we die without developing them ; such 
is the affirmative force of the constitution ; but if 
you are enfeebled by any cause, some of these sleep- 
ing seeds start and open. Meantime, at every stage 
we lose a foe. At fifty years, 'tis said, afflicted 
citizens lose their sick-headaches. I hope this he- 
gira is not as movable a feast as that one I an- 
nually look for, when the horticulturists assure me 
that the rose-bugs in our gardens disappear on the 
tenth of July ; they stay a fortnight later in mine. 
But be it as it may with the sick-headache, — 't is 
certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are 
lulled once for all as we come up with certain goals 
of time. The passions have answered their pur- 

VOL. vii. 20 



306 OLD AGE. 

pose : that slight but dread overweight with which 
in each instance Nature secures the execution of 
her aim, drops off. To keep man in the planet, 
she impresses the terror of death. To perfect the 
commissariat, she implants in each a certain rapac- 
ity to get the supply, and a little oversupply, of 
his wants. To insure the existence of the race, she 
reinforces the sexual instinct, at the risk of disor- 
der, grief, and pain. To secure strength, she plants 
cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo 
their office, and invite disease. But these tempo- 
rary stays and shifts for the protection of the young 
animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced by 
nobler resources. We live in youth amidst this 
rabble of passions, quite too tender, quite too hun- 
gry and irritable. Later, the interiors of mind and 
heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn 
the fatal compensations that wait on every act. 
Then, one after another, this riotous time-destroy- 
ing crew disappear. 

I count it another capital advantage of age, this, 
that a success more or less signifies nothing. Lit- 
tle by little it has amassed such a fund of merit 
that it can very well afford to go on its credit when 
it will. When I chanced to meet the poet Words- 
worth, then sixty-three years old, he told me that 
" he had just had a fall and lost a tooth, and when 
his companions were much concerned for the mis- 



OLD AGE. 307 

chance, he had replied that he was glad it had not 
happened forty years before." Well, Nature takes 
care tliat we shall not lose our organs forty years 
too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in 
the Supreme Court, and I was struck with a certain 
air of levity and defiance which vastly became him. 
Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him 
whether his pleading was good and effective. Now 
it is of importance to his client, but of none to 
himself. It has been long already fixed what he 
can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not 
gain or suffer from one or a dozen new perform- 
ances. If he should on a new occasion rise quite 
beyond his mark and achieve somewhat great and 
extraordinary, that, of course, would instantly tell ; 
but he may go below his mark with impunity, and 
people will say, ' O, he had headache,' or ' He lost 
his sleep for two nights.' What a lust of appear- 
ance, what a load of anxieties that once degraded 
him he is thus rid of! Every one is sensible of 
this cumulative advantage in living. All the good 
days behind him are sponsors, who speak for him 
when he is silent, pay for him when he has no 
money, introduce him where he has no letters, and 
work for him when he sleeps. 

A third felicity of age is that it has found ex- 
pression. The youth suffers not only from ungrati- 
ficd desires, but from powers untried, and from a 



308 OLD AGE. 

picture in Ms mind of a career wWcli has as yet no 
outward reality. He is tormented with the want 
of correspondence between things and thoughts. 
Michel Angelo's head is full of masculine and 
gigantic figures as gods walking, which make him 
savage until his furious chisel can render them into 
marble ; and of architectural dreams, until a hun- 
dred stone-masons can lay them in courses of trav- 
ertine. There is the like tempest in every good 
head in which some great benefit for the world is 
planted. The throes continue until the child is 
born. Every faculty new to each man thus goads 
him and drives him out into doleful deserts until it 
finds proper vent. All the functions of human 
duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning 
and chiding, until they are performed. He wants 
friends, employment, knowledge, power, house and 
land, wife and children, honor and fame ; he has 
religious wants, aesthetic wants, domestic, civil, hu- 
mane wants. One by one, day after day, he learns 
to coin his wishes into facts. He has his calling, 
homestead, social connection and personal power, 
and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is ap- 
peased by seeing some sort of correspondence be- 
tween his wish and his possession. This makes 
the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to 
every craving. He is serene who does not feel 
himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, 



OLD AGE. S09 

in particular and in general, allows the utterance 
of his mind. In old persons, when thus fully ex- 
pressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial, 
waxen complexion, which indicates that all the fer- 
ment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of 
thought and behavior. 

,The compensations of Nature play in age as in 
fouth. In a world so charged and sparkling with 
)ower, a man does not live long and actively with- 
lout costly additions of experience, which, though 
! not spoken, are recorded in his mind. What to the 
/■outh is only a guess or a hope, is in the veteran a 
; digested statute. He beholds the feats of the jun- 
f^iors with complacency, but as one who having long 
ago known these games, has refined them into re- 
sults and morals. The Indian Red Jacket, when 
the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, 
" But the sixties have all the twenties and forties 
^n them." 

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, 
and finishes its works, which to every artist is a 
supreme pleasure. Youth has an excess of sensibil- 
ity, before which every object glitters and attracts. 
We leave one pursuit for another, and the young 
man's year is a heap of beginnings. At the end 
of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for it, — 
not one completed work. But the time is not lost. 
Our instincts drove us to hive innumerable experi- 



310 OLD AGE. 

ences, that are yet of no visible value, and which 
we may keep for twice seven years before they 
shall be wanted. The best things are of secular 
growth. The instinct of classifying marks the wise 
and healthy mind. Linnaeus projects his system, 
and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, be- 
fore yet he has found in Nature a single plant to 
justify certain of his classes. His seventh class 
has not one. In process of time, he finds with de- 
light the little white Trientalis^ the only plant with 
seven petals and sometimes seven stamens, which 
constitutes a seventh class in conformity with his 
system. The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst 
as yet he has few shells. He labels shelves for 
classes, cells for species : all but a few are empty. 
But every year fills some blanks, and with accelerat- 
ing speed as he becomes knowing and known. An 
old scholar finds keen delight in verifying the im- 
pressive anecdotes and citations he has met with in 
miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years 
of youth. We carry in memory important anec- 
dotes, and have lost all clew to the author from 
whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from 
Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who 
said it. We have an admirable line worthy of 
Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind's 
ear, but have searched all probable and improbable 
books for it in vain. We consult the reading men : 



OLD AGE. 311 

but, strangely enough, tliey who know everythhig 
know not this. But especially we have a certain 
insulated thought, which haunts us, but remains in- 
sulated and barren. Well, there is nothing for all 
this but patience and tmie. Time, yes, that is the 
finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to cas- 
ualties, omniscient at last. The day comes when 
the hidden author of our story is found ; when the 
brave speech returns straight to the hero who said 
it ; when the admirable verse finds the poet to 
whom it belongs ; and best of all, when the lonely 
thought, which seemed so wise, yet half-wise, half- 
thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly 
matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, 
or next related analogy, which gives it insta^itly 
radiating power, and justifies the superstitious in- 
stinct with which we have hoarded it. We re- 
member our old Greek Professor at Cambridge, 
an ancient bachelor, amid his folios, possessed by 
this hope of completing a task, with nothing to 
break his leisure after the three hours of his daily 
classes, yet ever restlessly stroking his leg and as- 
suring himself " he should retire from the Univer- 
sity and read the authors." In Goethe's Romance, 
Makaria, the central figure for wisdom and influ- 
ence, pleases herself with withdrawing into soli- 
tude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence. 
Goethe himself carried this completion of studies 



312 OLD AGE. 

to the highest point. Many of his works hung on 
the easel from youth to age, and received a stroke 
in every month or year. A literary astrologer, he 
never applied himself to any task but at the happy 
moment when all the stars consented. Bentley 
thought himself likely to live till fourscore, — long 
enough to read everything that was worth reading, 
— '''Et tunc magna mei sub terris ihit imago^ 
Much wider is spread the pleasure which old men 
take in completing their secular affairs, the in- 
ventor his inventions, the agriculturist his experi- 
ments, and all old men in finishing their houses, 
rounding their estates, clearing their titles, reduc- 
ing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities, 
and leaving all in the best posture for the future. 
It must be believed that there is a proportion be- 
tween the designs of a man and the length of his 
life : there is a calendar of his years, so of his per- 
formances. 

America is the country of young men, and too 
full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity ; 
yet we have had robust centenarians, and examples 
of dignity and wisdom. I have lately found in an 
old note-book a record of a visit to ex-President 
John Adams, in 1825, soon after the election of his 
son to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and 
nothing important passed in the conversation ; but 
it reports a moment in the life of a heroic person. 



OLD AGE. 313 

who, in extreme old age, appeared still erect and 
worthy of his fame. 

, Feh., 1825. To-day at Quincy, with 



my brother, by invitation of Mr. Adams's family. 
The old President sat in a large stuffed arm-chair, 
dressed in a blue coat, black small-clothes, white 
stockings ; a cotton cap covered his bald head. 
We made our compliment, told him he must let us 
join our congratulations to those of the nation on 
the happiness of his house. He thanked us, and 
said : " I am rejoiced, because the nation is haj)py. 
The time of gratulation and congratulations is 
nearly over with me ; I am astonished that I have 
lived to see and know of this event. I have lived 
now nearly a century ; [he was ninety in the fol- 
lowing October ; ] a long, harassed, and distracted 
life." I said, " The world thinks a good deal of 
joy has been mixed with it." — " The world does 
not know " he replied, " how much toil, anxiety, 
and sorrow I have suffered." — I asked if Mr. 
Adams's letter of acceptance had been read to him. 
— " Yes," he said, and added, " My son has more 
political prudence than any man that I know who 
has existed in my time ; he never was put off his 
guard ; and I hope he will continue such : but what 
effect age may work in diminishing the power of 
his mind, I do not know ; it has been very much 



314 OLD AGE. 

on tlie stretch, ever since he was born. He has al- 
ways been laborious, child and man, from infancy." 

— When Mr. J. Q. Adams's age was mentioned, 
he said, " He is now fifty-eight, or will be in July ; " 
and remarked that " all the Presidents were of the 
same age : General Washington was about fifty- 
eight, and I was about fifty-eight, and Mr. Jeffer- 
son, and Mr. Madison, and Mr. Monroe." — We 
inquired when he expected to see Mr. Adams. — 
He said : " Never : Mr. Adams will not come to 
Quincy but to my funeral. It would be a great 
satisfaction to me to see him, but I don't wish him 
to come on my account." He sj^oke of Mr. Lech- 
mere, whom he " well remembered to have seen 
come down daily, at a great age, to walk in the old 
town-house," adding, " And I wish I could walk 
as well as he did. He was Collector of the Cus- 
toms for many years under the Royal Govern- 
ment." — E. said : " I suppose, sir, you would not 
have taken his place, even to walk as well as he." — 
" No, " he replied, " that was not what I wanted." 

— He talked of Whitefield, and remembered when 
he was a Freshman in College to have come into 
town to the Old South church, [I think,] to liear 
him, but could not get into the house ; — "I how- 
ever, saw him," he said, " through a window, and 
distinctly heard all. He had a voice such as I 
never heard before or since. He cast it out so that 



OLD AGE. 315 

you might hear it at the meeting-house," [pointing 
towards the Quincy meeting-house,] " and he had 
the grace of a dancing-master, of an actor of plays. 
His voice and manner helped him more than his 
sermons. I went with Jonathan Sewall." — " And 
you were pleased with him, sir ? " — " Pleased ! I 
was delighted beyond measure." — We asked if at 
Whitefield's return the same popularity continued. 
— " Not the same fury," he said, " not the same 
wild enthusiasm as before, but a greater esteem, as 
he became more known. He did not terrify, but 
was admired." 

We spent about an hour in his room. He speaks 
very distinctly for so old a man, enters bravely into 
long sentences, which are interrupted by want of 
breath, but carries them invariably to a conclusion, 
without correcting a word. 

He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, and 
" Peep at the Pilgrims," and " Saratoga," with 
praise, and named with accuracy the characters 
in them. He likes to have a person always read- 
ing to him, or company talking in his room, and is 
better the next day after having visitors in his 
chamber from morning to night. 

He received a premature report of his son's elec- 
tion, on Sunday afternoon, without any excite- 
ment, and told the reporter he had been hoaxed, 
for it was not yet time for any news to arrive. The 



316 OLD AGE. 

informer, something damped in liis heart, insisted 
on repairing to the meeting-house, and proclaimed 
it aloud to the congregation, who were so over-' 
joyed that they rose in their seats and cheered 
thrice. The Reverend Mr. Whitney dismissed 
them immediately. 

/ When life has been well spent, age is a loss of 
Vhat it can well, spare, — muscular strength, or- 
ganic instincts, gi'oss bulk, and works that belong 
to these. But the central wisdom, which was old 
in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, drop- 
ping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the 
mind purified and wise. I have heard that who- 
ever loves is in no condition old. I have heard 
that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doc- 
■ trine of immortality is announced ; it cleaves to his 
; constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and 
\no whisper comes to us from the other side. But 
the inference, from the working of intellect, hiving 
, knowledge, hiving skill, — at the end of life just 
ready to be born, — affirms the inspirations of af- 
V fection and of the moral sentiment. 



